UK Licensing Site Requires MSIE Emulation, But Won't Work With MSIE

Anne Thwacks writes The British Government web site for applying for for a licence to be a security guard requires a plugin providing Internet Explorer emulation on Firefox to login and apply for a licence. It won't work with Firefox without the add-on, but it also wont work with Internet Explorer! (I tried Win XP and Win7 Professional). The error message says "You have more than one browser window open on the same internet connection," (I didn't) and "to avoid this problem, close your browser and reopen it." I did. No change.

I tried three different computers, with three different OSes. Still no change. I contacted their tech support and they said "Yes ... a lot of users complain about this. We have known about it since September, and are working on a fix! Meanwhile, we have instructions on how to use the "Fire IE" plugin to get round the problem." Eventually, I got this to work on Win7pro. (The plugin will not work on Linux). The instructions require a very old version of the plugin, and a bit of trial and error is needed to get it to work with the current one. How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"

Comments

Perhaps it's an aptitude test in disguise

[Hognoxious]

If you can make it work, you passed!

On the other hand, you're a hacker and probably a terrorist. So you failed.

Pure Genius!

[Required Snark]

First, they are applying security through obscurity. Since it's pre-broken, only those who can think out of the box will be able to apply.

Second, it's a great way to screen applicants. Only those who are truly adept and motivated will get through this barrier to entry.

I think this is the wave of the future. Employers can put up broken application sites and only look at the candidates that can figure it out. They don't even have to spend much to make it bad in the first place. Just outsource it to the lowest bidder, preferably in a country with a different language. Heck, have them do it in their native language and then apply some cheap ass internationalization package.

All this needs is a catchy name that sounds cool like "scrum" or "cloud scale" and it will become the next big thing. There will be certificate programs in whatever it's called and "Whatever it's called for Dummies". Wired and the Wall Street Journal will write articles. Hop on that bandwagon now and make those big bucks!

This is to make sure the only ones who can apply..

[ks9208661]

... are people who still use PCs from the 90s, most likely from Eastern Europe, so UKIP can continue complaining about foreigners stealing jobs away from the Brits.

Re:It's quite simple really...

[nospam007]

"Apologies for the wall of text btw, Slashdot mangles my posts for some reason even though I type them out with line breaks."

You need to use the IE emulation extension in Firefox for it to work.