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You do have a choice.

Not necessarily; if you're on Jobseekers Allowance for example you could lose your unemployment benefits (PDF) by turning down a job. Admittedly that's still a choice, but one that's not necessarily viable.

They do say "without good reason". I'm unsure about whether "they looked at information I made publicly available" would be a good enough reason, definitely worth asking Job Centre staff about first.

I wouldn't be surprised if a UK based jobsite found that the hits were biased more towards IE than the average. When I was looking for a job not too long ago I found that the governments own Job Centre website would only work properly with IE. Happily, I am now not in a position to know if this is still the case.

It's not just American government sites. Looking for employment on the UK government site also requires internet explorer! http://www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk/

"Websites that proved difficult for Firefox users to navigate included the government website Jobcentreplus.gov.uk ..."

It's buried away in the FAQ, but "you can also search the Jobcentre Plus jobs database by visiting http://www.worktrain.gov.uk/", which does work with FireFox.

It's not perfect. There are too many pages before you get to results, they don't make logging in very easy and it doesn't handle having multiple tabs open well, but it's better than the Jobcentreplus.gov.uk site and seems to find more relevant results.

Having said that I still seem to find more jobs I want to apply for on http://www.jobsite.co.uk/ than any other site.

I have in the past experienced problems with sites that didn't work properly (as recently as yesterday) in Opera, but worked fine in IE. The typical problem was poor web site design.

Make the web a nicer place.

From the actual study located at http://www.scivisum.co.uk/press-releases/200506_Fi refox_Web_Test_Study.htm

"Guilty websites

Odeon (http://www.odeon.co.uk/ a major cinema chain has received criticism for months for accessibility issues - even now its' opening 'splash page' seems at first glance to be working fine but click on the 'enter' button and Firefox users are offered a blank page.

On the Jobcentreplus (http://www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk/ home page, Firefox users find that the 'Job search' button opens a new page, but the user can't perform a search, because the first choice "Select a Job Group from the list" is an empty box.

Online insurance site, http://www.insurance.co.uk/ run by Lloyds TSB works, but gives the user the visual impression that it is broken - menu items have 'missing images' icons in Firefox, but not IE.

Similarly, a FTSE100 tobacco company, British American Tobacco's website (http://www.bat.com/ effectively hides most of it's pages from Firefox users - their menu system doesn't show sub-menu choices if you're not using IE."

Well, thats 4 websites...so, if thats 10%, that means that there are only 40 websites in the UK, according to my Athlon XP 3200+ Clawhammers FPU...

Actually, I believe that JScript, which IE uses, is a superset of ECMAscript (AKA 'standard' javascript). In other words, IE uses Javascript with extras.

I'm not too sure where Firefox lacks in Javascript support; so far as I know it does have 100% compatibility. However the only problems I have ever had with javascript and Firefox is when the javascript is coded incorrectly. IE is more tolerant of broken code than Firefox is.

For instance, the UK Job Centre's job-search webpage uses javascript that works in IE but not in Firefox. The root of the problem in this case is bad coding. In Firefox, the function getElementById it does exactly what it says and no more; it returns an element object dependant on the id attribute. In IE, getElementById gets elements by their id or by their name. Presumably this is to help compensate for shoddy developers mistakes, yet it has the added disadvantage of producing invalid javascript.

I'm curious to know; what sites that use javascript have you found that don't work in Firefox? If I were a betting man, I'd be willing to wager that all the problems you find are down to shoddy javascript errors that IE glosses over. In other words, the problem lies with the website developer.

The worst culprit?
The UK's online Job Centre

I wonder why?

root@homebox root# nmap -sV -P0 www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk
Starting nmap 3.50 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2005-02-09 22:57 GMT
Interesting ports on 205.141.227.197:
(The 1657 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
80/tcp open http Microsoft IIS webserver 4.0

The UK Job Centre website has an irritating feature in the job search part, where you fill out a form selecting the type of job you want, before being asked where in the country you're looking for a job. My wife found this incredibly frustrating, as every time she wanted to alter the particularly narrow job type search parameters, she needed to re-enter the location.

Another one I came across at the weekend was UGC Cinemas. I was trying to book tickets for LOTR. After I selected the location, the film, the time I wanted, selected how many tickets I wanted, entered my name, credit card details, email adress (with confirmation), phone number (with confirmation), and confirmed all the details, then and only then it decided to tell me that it couldn't go ahead with the booking because the showing was sold out. It wouldn't be so bad if I could just change the time to a later showing, but no, I'm back to the start and I have to re-enter everything again. It was only on my third attempt I found a showing with free seats...

At lease the film turned out ok! ;)