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Walmart Rejects Firefox and Safari
babooo404 writes "Last week, Walmart launched their online video download service. Immediately there were posts that the service did not work with the Firefox or Safari browsers. There was a collective, "WTF" when this happened as this is 2007, not 1997. Now it appears that reports are out that Walmart has completely turned off the ability to get into the application at all by Firefox, Safari or any other browser it does not like."
Raises its ugly head. I can't tell you how many development groups I'd seen hobbled by outside politics vs real-world applications and logic. Sounds all conspiracy theoryish, but in the world of marketing, you can't get away from these things. Looks like Wall Mart got the Microsoft Kool-Aid.
I wonder who developed the video download site for walmart. It doesn't look or feel anything like the rest of their site.
The sheep that march to Walmart's "Low Prices -- Whatever the Cost" beat will not be affected. They are good consumers. Not hippie freaks, using products that cannot be found on the acres of shelving at Walmart. Walmart understands the threat of free software. Walmart understands the danger of choice. Give the customers too many choices, and they just furrow their brows endlessly, taking forever to make a purchase, or worse, not making one at all!
(1) The slashweenie community don't want to pay for anything, so they aren't customers, so keeping them out won't lose any money.
(2) On the other hand the sort of people who hack DRM systems are most likely nerds who have a religious antipathy to IE, so won't be able to get onto to site in order to work out how to hack it.
(3) So, by restricting access to IE they have achieved the following:
(a) delayed, possibly by as much as many days, the hacking of the DRM system, thus protecting their business model for long enough for them to actually make a little money
(b) lost exactly $0.00 in business that they wouldn't have got from the slashweenies anyway.
Sounds like a good decision.
A lot of people thought this would go the way of their last video offering. It now seems that they are dedicated to making it a failure. Too bad, the more competitors in the on-line video business, the better.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Does anyone know if the movies are the altered "family friendly" versions of real versions?
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
I don't think it's that at all. WalMart is so profitable because it targets average middle America. Its niche happens to be precisely the vast bulk of people who don't know much about computers and stick with the default Internet Explorer. Because the company targets this niche so successful, it obviously would feel little need to ensure that its site works with the minority of users who use other browsers. It's not fear of hackers, it's just a desire to do as little work as possible.
In any event, should we really care about not being to shop online at Wal-Mart? Check out a report like Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect (New York: Penguin, 2006) and you'll be convinced to take your business anywhere but there. At the same time you help Grandma install Firefox to beat the constant threat of spyware and adware installation, you might also want to do a good turn by doing some shopping for her at a locally-owned store...assuming you have any left.
Having a small-town business in my family, as well as most of my friend's families owning their own businesses, I agree with the get local first. And I haven't set foot inside a Walmart, much less bought from them, in over 3 years.
The website for Wal-Mart employees to check on their benefits is the same way.
http://www.walmartbenefits.com/
And add to the problem by 'proving' that the majority of browsers hitting the site are MSIE.
See, when clients come begging that is the perfect time to MONETIZE! Except of course if you're a thick-headed geek and already programmed valuable features on your own time ;)
It's difficult to develop such complex functionality using DRM for multiple platforms. I don't see a problem in selecting the most cost efficient platform and then working from that.
Except that every computer has IE installed. What is the average user going to do? Write walmart a nasty letter because firefox won't work on their site, or just click on the little blue "e" and copy the URL into internet explorer? You must remember that us techno-geeks don't make up a whole lot of marketshare. The average user is just going to use what works.
I got nothin'
You aren't "smart" if you're a good doctor, but a bad driver, or a good mechanic, but a lousy brain surgeon. I dunno. I'd be sort of wary of having brain surgery done on me by a Mechanic. Besides, don't people say Einstein was smart? Or Hawking is smart? Somehow I doubt either of them could/can perform brain surgery (physical issues such as disease or death aside, I'm speaking purely from a training point of view). That doesn't make them any less smart. But I do agree that this guy is sounding kind of stupid.
Rawr
the DRM software in version 10 is probably not included automagically in all regular windows xp sp2 installations, meaning that if you want to use the store with your dial-up modem (as many people would- not trying to troll here), you would have to first upgrade all your MS stuff via Windows update, probably not knowing to uncheck the windows genuine advantage box, and downloading and instaling that.
Some of the patches are great, some not so much. If I patch my computer over a 768kbps connection or lower and something breaks all because I wanted to use walmart's video store, I am a totally pissed off consumer.
One wonders if MS didn't have a hand in this...
That's why I always open install the 'open with IE' Add-On. Then when Grandma says that the site doesn't work, I can tell her that the site is broken, and might not be secured. I explain that she can get to it by clicking the open with ie button, but she should know that it might break her computer if she does. I explain the IE doesn't tell you when the site is broken or insecure. I then make a face, and tell her that ...Well... Walmart MIIGGGHHHT be safe, but that I'm surprised such a big store would have an insecure broken site. This has the following effects:
She doesn't immediately switch back to IE.
She places the blame for the broken site on the proper entity
She avoids sites that are IE only, as she perceives them as dangerous and broken
She can still go to the sites that are IE only if it is really important to her.
If it is a site that she is going to go to anyway, you can set the plug in to automatically load in IE, and grandma care for that site.
Living in a small town, I am glad I don't have to pay the extortion that small-town-businesses are prone to charge for ordinary daily items. The local hardware store charges like six times as much for some items than I pay for them at Lowes or WalMart.
... the last couple times I've been there I had great service from a particular employee. In both cases I made a point to call up the store's regional manager and praise this person. Two months later I found out that this employee had not received any mention, acknowledgement or recognition.
Two theories
(1) Such quality service may be the expected day-to-day norm, so management may have put the employee in the "meeting expectations" bucket and hence warranted no attention. As opposed to the "needs improvement" bucket which does warrant attention.
(2) Providing "too much" service to a single customer is a negative in management's eyes and you did the employee no favor with your praise. When a store's strategy is price leadership cost cutting may rule customer interaction. Employees may be expected to always be exceptionally friendly and polite but offer little more than telling you what isle to find something on. More expensive retailers that focus on customer service would be more appreciative of your call. Say a Macy's sales rep in a clothing department spending 5 minutes with you picking matching shirts and ties. In short, "good" varies with corporate strategy.
Sure there are probably a few difficult to do work arounds (as it takes more than changing a user agent to get this to play nice). According to some developers, using "flash" is a workaround in and of itself since it "displays the same in all browsers". Of course, that isn't really true, and even when flash does display, I can't resize flash, the fonts are often so tiny that I & my elderly parents have to break out a magnifying glass to even attempt to make use of the content.
I still expect that when I attempt Ecommerce on the web that I'll likely have to use IE 6 or better at some point. I have been pleasantly surprised as of late that most of the companies I've delt with on the web allowed me to complete transactions in Opera and/or Mozilla/Firefox. One of the ironies I've encountered is that it is often the bigger companies which make it impossible to use IE & not the smaller shops. Sometimes you come across a poorly coded site on a small shop, but the large companies try to add everything under the sun to allegedly make the experience better and it ends up breaking things. Larger companies tend to set up more roadblocks of endless forms to fill out as well, and forced registration..etc I've abandoned more purchases due to if I can't complete my transaction in two screens (and really only want one) then its not worth my time to buy there. If it takes 20 minutes to checkout, to hell with them -- my time isn't free. Amazon.com will *never* have me as a customer due to their checkout. I don't care if I only have to fill it out once. If it takes longer on the web to order than calling the place on the phone, I'm not going to do business with them -- and if I have to use flash to complete the transaction, I'm likely not going to do business with them either as many of the applications written for it break in other browsers without reporting an error despite the touts of many developers that "flash makes everything display and work the same".
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Not this one.
....Has anyone else with Firefox, Safari, Opera and other browsers tried going to the Walmart site?......
Just for fun, yes I have. When I use straight Safari I got the message that Walmart only supports IE, but when I told Safari to lie (debug mode) and tell their site that I am using IE, with Windows, it worked fine. Of course I didn't attempt to download anything which i would never do anyway. After all, I like old movies and have gotten some from Walmart at $5.50 or so outa of their bargain bin. Eventually I suppose the expensive downloads on the site will sell for that price or less also.
It seems they are deliberately doing this as a matter of policy. It has nothing to do with programming incompatibility.
All theory is gray
Got the user agent switcher plugin. Even though I'm running Ubuntu with FF2.0 I lie and tell mallmart that I'm running ie6 on windwosXP. Get in just fine. It runs just fine.
Typical lazy programming. If the ID-10-T's designing this sight had done any studying at all since about 2000 they would know you don't need to build browser specific sites if you bother to code to standards. Even IE will work.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
When I do that with Firefox, with User Agent Switcher set to IE 6 on XP, I get a pretty amazing mess:
http://pipct.net/temp/malwart.gif
So their site also depends rather heavily on Javascript.
Unsupported Browser Warning. We have detected that the browser you are using is not able to view some of the more advanced elements of our >website, and may prevent you from completing your booking.
To view supported and tested configurations, pleaseclick here
I wrote to them to complain, saying that there is no reason why they can't make a web site that works with any modern browser. They wrote back to me and "helpfully" suggested this as a solution to "MY" problem:
We have been made aware that some of our customers encounter at times difficulties in using their MAC computer when trying to use the Air Canada Web Site. Even though we are working to improve our web site, these following quick steps have proven to be quite useful for most of our clients to enable debug functionality on Mac. To enable this functionality :
(1) Go to and download OnyX
(2). Open OnyX and select the "APPEARANCE" tab and then select the "Misc." tab, far right
(3) Enable the "Safari Debug menu" option.
(4) Quit OnyX and then open Safari.
(5)You will now see a "Debug" menu on the far right-navigate down to "User Agent" on this menu and select "Windows MSIE 6.0"
(6) Safari is now behaving like Windows IE version 6.
So the "solution" is to pretend that I am using Explorer to make the warning go away. If anyone thinks that this is a viable solution then perhaps 'faking' Explorer will work for Walmart as well.
Is there any site out there that we can direct companies like Walmart or Air Canada to to explain why they should make a standards compliant web site?