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

Its like normal web development, but worse

[MichaelSmith]

Welcome to government procurement.

Re:Its like normal web development, but worse

[ShanghaiBill]

I can tell you it's not government but incompetence.

For private companies, bankruptcy puts a ceiling on the amount of incompetence that can be tolerated. For government, there is no limit.

What are you saying?

[hcs_$reboot]

Are you saying the civil service is bad and incompetent in the UK? I'm afraid it's the case in most European countries. This is a good test actually: do you disapprove their slowness, incompetence and laziness (to name a few)? If 'yes', then 1) you're normal 2) you're (probably) competent and 3) don't work there.

Re: Isn't Government wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

This government is evil perspective is just an effect of brainless propaganda mostly from the land of the free. In reality the bigger the organisation the bigger its problems with efficiency. This does not mean there are no well done government projects nor daoes it mean all private enterprise is perfect. This seems to be a general problem with black and white vision not only techie weirdos have. I like simple b&w approach too, it makes life 'easier'.

Re: Isn't Government wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no need as corporations are in charge of government!

Bingo: this is itself a test :-)

[bradley13]

My son is applying for a computer science program at a fairly prestigious university. If you try to follow the links that ought to lead to the online application process, at least one of them is broken - it links to an internal server instead of to the public website. You can look at the URL and figure out what it ought to have been, based on other URLs on the site. Accident? Or pre-filtering their applicants?

But require IE? Worse, a Firefox emulation of IE? No, that's a different message. That's telling good applicants "you do not want to work here"...