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

Posted by timothy on from the strange-circlings-back dept.

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?"

3 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Its like normal web development, but worse by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Welcome to government procurement.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
    1. Re:Its like normal web development, but worse by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re: Isn't Government wonderful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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'.