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

It's quite simple really...

[Malfuros the Wizard]

The people who developed the site are idiots... I was working with a client recently and discovered they had a problem with a web site they had to use. They were on IE11 and the web site only works with IE9 and I really do mean IE9 and nothing else. The service provider tech support said the solution was they would have to uninstall IE11 and then install IE9 Idiots, there is no other way of describing it, utter idiots. There is no good excuse for a website not to work in all major browsers, it really is that simple but then I'm just a guy who has to make sure the websites he develops work properly in order to get paid, these companies that provide websites for government departments at costs of millions or billions can get away with stupid shit like this because of the contracts they create.

Re:It's quite simple really...

[sjames]

Even keeping Hanlon's razor in mind, there is a point where incompetence rises to such a level that it is indistinguishable from malice. It had to take a lot of work to create the incompatibilities described. Starting with even caring that more than one window is open. Even back in the stupid old days where Netscape users would actually get an error about a site being IE only, it generally would actually work if you simply impersonated IE in the client string.

It can sometimes be hard to make a site look just so in all browsers, but it's equally hard to make it not work at all except in a single browser. Harder still to add a requirement for a particular version of a plugin. I wonder how many tens of percent less work it would have been to do it right or at least passably.

Re:Its like normal web development, but worse

[jellomizer]

I found found, it isn't about technical skills, but stupid decisions made from a group think process. While prevalent in all sectors government is the biggest offenders because government culture of "It is the mistakes you make which can hurt you" vs. Private which focuses more on your success. So government spends a lot of its time trying to figure out how many ways something can fail catastrophically, which could hurt their career.

So for this case, I get the impression that they put in a funky system to try to prevent bots from filling out the paperwork, because if they hear that their website allows bots to fill out licenses they could get in trouble. I am guessing they added this near the last minute of the project so the page was designed differently. Causing this complex stupidness.