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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."
And the internets was all like "double-you tee eff, mate?"
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 mean come on, doesn't everyone know that the internet is run on Windows software and IE is the only REAL web browser! Anyone who uses anything else MUST be a hacker trying to break their site.
Which is why I use a user-agent that says "I am not a Googlebot/2.1". But change it to IE or something else if websites don't like it.
I wank in the shower.
They're not called the Evil Store Of Death for nothing.
Shocking revelation: one big profit driven multinational corporation being paid by another big profit driven multinational corporation to do something they probably shouldn't be doing. Whatever next?
I guess they just lost the chance in getting my money.
Well, I take that back, they never had a chance at getting my money.
As I walk through the valley of death I fear no one, for I am the meanest sonova bitch in the valley!
Firefox users by their very nature are the sort of people to try something new. Firefox is something you have to go out of your way to install on Windows, it's not bundled with Windows, and so I rather suspect that the 15% (approx) of internet users who have it as their primary browser are among the top 15% of people who are most likely to try a new video download service. Walmart are blocking the very people who will try this thing.
Now, if I were a Walmart stock holder I'd be asking some very searching questions about whether or not the board is acting in my best interest with this move. If I invest in a company I expect the people running it to work to make my investment pay a good return. Hell, they have a legal duty to do so (in the UK where I live anyway).
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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!
FTA: "The video that you download requires Digital Rights Management 10 (DRM 10) software"
So, the video only works in Windows (Media Player 10+, presumably). I think it's safe to assume that if you have WMP10, you also have IE, so if making the site IE-only prevents* people from accessing it who can't use the product anyway, what's the big deal?
*Yeah, yeah. "I don't WANNA use IE on my Windows box. IE sucks." It's not like you have to UNinstall Firefox to do so, so suck it up, princess.
I've been on the fence about shopping at walmart for awhile. They're never my first choice, and I think I've only been shopping there about 5 times in the past year. After this, it's one more reason not to shop there. Yet another reason - unrelated - was that 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. Just seemed to speak volumes about how they treat their people, and this latest move speaks to how they treat their customers.
creation science book
Bit Torrent still works. It's completely cross-platform, too.
(When I said "Don't worry," I was saying that to the customers. WalMart should worry.)
-- My Weblog.
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
Think of this as a favor on Walmart's side. They only want to suck money out of sackers who use IE. They spared FF/Safari users from their greed, so to say...
How many of FF/Safari users out there sincerely want to buy movies from Walmart? I don't even live in the States, so I wouldn't even try.
If you want to use this service, the downloads require Digital Rights Management 10 (DRM 10) software. This doesn't just lock out browsers that they don't know how to code for, but also all non-Microsoft operating systems.
The fact the Walmart is behind this also scares me. Walmart has changed the face of American retail for good and bad. Walmart has been able to force it's suppliers to bow to their knees for fear that Walmart doesn't carry their product. If the number one retailer in the world would have realized what their customers want, media without restrictions, this could have actually fought and easily won against the iTunes store, and NetFlix. I just hope this doesn't catch on, because it will give other retailers another justification to place Microsoft's desires above that of the consumers.
The part I dont like is people continue to support these tactics by using/patronizing the products/places that are directly responsible to taking away their choice and alternative. Wise up people. You may one day wake up to find you have no options left.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
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.
we can always /. it
root of all...
Lauch.com still doesnt support Firefox for their audio streams and goes the more than doubtful way of attempting to install a flavor of the Mozilla ActiveX Plugin (bases on this one, just with the WMP ActiveX Plugin and their page in the whitelist) This gets more funny when u go to a european MTV side and start thier "Overdrive" plattform, which will attempt exactly the same. I guess this wide use(without contributing to the code at all) is the very reason why there isn't any ActiveX Plugin for Firefox 2.0 yet on the original page.. But going back it s just idiotic to try to get the user to install it at all.. it s not stable enough.. it s more a proove of concept than mission critical code.. and it s more to bypass the problem of sites that are coded in an IE only way... There is a WMP plugin for Mozilla Browsers!!! You just have to script it properly (with JS that is) it s not rocket science. Why am i telling this all? My point is: if Yahoo and MTV can't do this, why should out of all Walmart be able to? (okay it seems like MTV_com is better.. i just cant open any video cause it seems to check the IP and then says they cant show me that in my country... IP block cause of IP rights.. isnt it ironic? i know, proxy is the solution) On a sidenote AOL doesnt seem to be any better.. right it s AOL... hey guys... if your new strategy really shall work you better.. ah hell we have told you a million times...
HP Video Merchant
precisely why they do not care about what browser you use.
I reject your reality
Go to google. Search for "buy dvd."
Find the walmart adwords ad.
Click it.
Walmart sends money to google.
You go to the beta entrance to walmart downloads.
Click it.
Start over.
Safari runs on Mac OS X. You can't watch the Walmart movies without WMP/DRM v10. You won't have that on a Mac. That's probably where Walmart's reasoning ends.
Walmart employees get benefits?
I get (after a few refreshes) (rendered as text from the server) an HTML page that reads: "The Wal-Mart Video Downloads store is currently unavailable due to temporary site maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Either they're fixing it or are slashdotted?
As much as I hate Walmart, they did sell the Linspire systems; I think this is laziness more than intention.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I think its interesting that the majority of comments so far place Slashdotters in the demographic of people who don't shop at Walmart. I believe this is mistaken, or at least a gross over generalization. I for one am a poor college student, I shop at Walmart because I don't tons of money that would let me shop at other places. Lets face it, Walmart is often cheaper for many products. So, to stretch the $50, that are all I have to my name at the moment, the farthest I shop at Walmart. I also use Firefox, so I don't think its really fair to lump the people who use Firefox with those who are financially stable enough to shop else where than Walmart. Remember, living below the poverty line doesn't mean you're stupid, it does mean that you have to make some decisions as to what you'll spend your money on. As in, if I want to have my own computer and high-speed internet (which I see as a necessity since I'm a CS major and do undergraduate research in machine learning), then I shop for groceries, clothes, etc. where they are the least expensive.
I think that, more interesting than the lack of support for Firefox, Safari, Opera, et al is the fact that it does not seem to support Linux. Specifically Kubuntu 6.10 with Opera 9.10 got me this little nugget of joy:
We're sorry, your operating system is incompatible. To provide the best download experience, we can no longer support Windows 98, ME or NT. Please visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP. Visit our Help section for complete system requirements information.
Same exact issue with IE6 (ies4Linux) as well.
Honestly, I wouldn't be using Wal-Mart of all places to download my music, but it is still somewhat of a poke in the eye, not just to alternative browsers, but alternative Operating Systems as well, it would appear.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Channel 4 (UK), Amazon, Blockbuster, etc. iTunes isn't in the same league, but still requires the use of a seperate app. Even some uploading is restricted, Metacafe (as was mentioned on /. a few weeks ago) uses flash (!) to upload videos and can't handle linux contributors.
There is currently no legal competition for the likes of TPB and Mininova, and thus the movie producers will keep losing out.
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?
I had the same, "oh, so what?" reaction at first, but your post made me realize: Walmart's dominance in the marketplace (and indeed, calling them a "niche" retailer is hysterical) means that all those grandmothers, aunts, uncles, significant others, friends, etc which we have spent time convincing to use some other browser ("It works with almost everything, PLEASE use it instead of Internet Explorer") hit walmart.com and get a big "I DO NOT WORK WITH THIS SILLY LITTLE BROWSER."
What happens? Grandpa mutters something, we look like idiots/liars, the alternative browser never gets used again, and Internet Explorer's market share creeps back up. Grandpa tells his buddies at the VFW that his "rocket scientist" grandson installed some "Flame squirrel" browser that didn't *even* work with *Walmart's* website. Etc.
By the way, folks- it's best to encourage people to use almost anything but IE, and not just ONE other browser, to encourage standards compliance. Already, site designers seem to only care/brag about making sites work in IE or Firefox- and said site breaks in Safari, Opera, etc. That's not how the web is supposed to work.
Please help metamoderate.
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'
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Of course once users do get in the website, they'll most likely find that the available content if wrapped in MS-only DRM. So getting in with Safari or Firefox (on a non Windows machine) would presumably be pointless anyway (except possibly to transfer the data to a windows machine at a later time, assuming that such a thing is even possible).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
If you don't like what Wal-Mart is doing the answer is pretty simple -- don't shop there.
This is one of those things where the market will correct itself. The natural evolutionary path being that they will lose market share to users of non-Windows based platforms as well as Windows users that use non-IE browsers. That's probably a fair segment of the market.
This problem will take care of itself.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
You must have missed the poster's other line: us techno-geeks don't make up a whole lot of marketshare.
I highly doubt there's many average users who have home-built PCs without Windows.
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
You're exaggerating to say that 35 percent of the market uses something other than IE. As a Safari user, I'd certainly like more people to use anything other than IE, simply because it forces sites to pay attention to cross-platform compatibility. But IE still controls something like 80 percent of the market.
= 0
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
The most popular portable video player (by far) is the ipod. Do the math.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
It used to be pre-installed, yes. My iBook G4 had IE 5.2 preinstalled. My MacBook did not come with IE at all.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
That's simply not true. Modern IE is Windows-only. IE5 was the last version that had any non-Windows implementations. MS abandoned both the MacOS and Solaris versions years ago, leaving them full of holes that will never be fixed and non-functional on modern systems. Apple is shipping half a million Macs every month without IE and with no way to run IE without an emulator, virtual machine, or dual-boot setup.
This is true, but off-target. The Mac segment of the home computer population (which is significantly larger than the Linux segment or the Mac share of new sales) is not mostly "techno-geeks" at all. Depending on whose numbers you believe (and WM's internal numbers might be best for them...) the shunning of non-IE browsers locks out 7-20% of users completely, and they are generally a more affluent segment.
Of course, that does not mean the decision by WM is not smart business. They know all about market segmentation and how to focus on winnable games. The no-IE segment is messy and expensive to serve, and the biggest slice (Mac users) has a lock-in to the existing dominant player in commercial video download: Apple. There's also a problem with the content providers: they demand strong DRM and that is hard to provide without staying MS-only or being Apple.
This story won't die and keeps popping up. But no one seems to care that the drm used for the videos will only work in windows. Which means safari support would be extremely retarded, and firefox support isn't needed. What would be the point in letting someone purchase drm video through firefox when they might not be on a windows platform. It makes perfect sense to restrict a windows only product to ie, it's a safe guard to prevent people who can't use the videos from buying them. If walmart allowed purchases through firefox, everyone would be freaking out about how non windows users can buy videos they can't play.
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
... 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.
Lenovo-compatible PC"? What the FUCK? yes our DRM software require all of the current ChiCom backdoors to insure user compliance with our EULA's by means of user monitoring.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This is another one of those crap articles that links to a blog, which links to other blogs, and doesn't link to the actual source of the problem.
Which is WalMart Video Downloads (Beta).. And which is currently returning the message "Site Temporarily Unavailable The Wal-Mart Video Downloads store is currently unavailable due to temporary site maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please try again later."
So see what happens when it comes back up.
Of course, the real problem is probably that, having downloaded, you can only play the resulting download with Windows Media Player.
They misspelled "DRM protection".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
No. This is Walmart's competitor to the iTunes Store. And Mac users are not welcome. It's almost as if Walmart doesnt't want to actually succeed. They've up and launched a competing solution, and then told a very large chunk of potential switchers that there will be no easy migration. This goes way beyond stupid and in to the territory of not working in stockholder's interests.
We all know that there are no technical reasons for Walmart's store to be IE only. Either Walmart does not want the store to be successful, or they are being bribed to make it IE-only, or their studio-approved DRM is Windows-only. No matter what, there is something underhanded going on here.
That's no solution.
OSX is not broken, the site is. And any site that tries to force you to use a particular browser does not deserve your business.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yes but unfortunately for Walmart I suspect it is the geeks that will be the first addopters of these types of services. So while to the techno-geeks are a small part of the global market they are probably a huge part of the addopter market for the Walmart's service. I suspect that Walmart's video services will end up just as successfull as DVD service.
1. Wal-Mart fears they will lose customers to Apple.
2. Wal-Mart launches internet distribution.
3. Wal-Mart removes Safari and Firefox support, thus ensuring they WILL lose customers to Apple.
4. PROFIT! err... Oh, snap!
Not this one.
Nothing here in Lynx.
Mind you, the video plug-in for lynx sucks anyway.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Not for Mac OS X, at least. IE 5.1 is (IIRC) the last version for PowerPC-based Macs (don't know if it runs on Classic or if it needs Mac OS 8 or 9 running on the metal), and IE 4.something (4.01?) is the last version for 68K Macs.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
Most of whom will be buying their online music from Apple. What I find curious about this is that Walmart still sells computer with Linspire. They're actually denying access to customers who have bought their computer from Walmart!
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?