Somewhere, a web developer is cowering in the corner of a dark closet after making this mistake. The site isn’t just a little broken, it’s completely broken beyond all recognition in Firefox and I’d hate to see what it looks like in Safari or IE on a Mac.
Though their service only caters to IE users, there’s no reason the site should be that degraded in other browsers. At very least, degrade gracefully with a clear notice stating the site is intended for use in Internet Explorer only — it’s about usability. While some sites that are not heavily trafficked can get away with this (and I don’t suggest they try to), Wal*Mart does not fall into that category.
As it stands, since TechCrunch revealed this faux pas on Tuesday February 6, 2007, the site is still borked beyond recognition in Firefox on Wednesday February 7, 2007. I would like to think someone has already informed Wal*Mart of the problem, and I would like to think it wouldn’t take a team more than a few hours to correct. Of course, my thinking could be completely wrong.
On a parting note, I randomly clicked on the upper right hand portion of the screen (which appears blank) and was brought to the Wal*Mart homepage. Wasn’t expecting that. By the way, their homepage appears just fine in Firefox.
Discuss "Forgot About Firefox (and possibly some other browsers)" with Teli
9 February shows this notice on their homepage: “Walmart.com is temporarily unavailable while we make important upgrades to our site. We appreciate your patience and invite you to return soon.”
Wonder what kind of important upgrade they’re talking about - would a Firefox usable website count as an upgrade then?
[ February 9th, 2007 at 3:41 am] [ #Link ]
LOL, I believe so Els.
Wouldn’t be surprised if we went to the site and found a completely new version of it waiting for Firefox users.
And it appears we’re right. Just clicked through to the site and it appears Wal*Mart has followed my advice. Instead of a borked version of the site being fed to Firefox and other unsupported browsers, Wal*Mart degrades gracefully with a message informing the user that their browser is not supported by the service.
I hope this serves as a lesson to other big name websites when they launch a new service targeting only one portion of the browsing internet.
~ Teli
[ February 9th, 2007 at 10:09 am] [ #Link ]
Funny coz I was gonna post about this too but was too lazy. Anyways, I was able to see the “messed-up” site and also when it was inaccessible if you were using a browser other than IE. Has the site been fixed yet?
Btw, thanks for dropping by my blog and for the comment. Have a nice day!
[ February 12th, 2007 at 11:24 pm] [ #Link ]