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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?"
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?"
Welcome to government procurement.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Uh no, sadly.
For example, Vodafone's "Mobile Broadband" dongles have apparently failed to work with OS X Yosemite (ie the current version) for a similar length of time for me and many others (the software crashes immediately) and Vodafone's 3rd-line tech support admits there is no fix (the person I spoke to is a Mac user himself and was rather embarrassed), but apparently Vodafone is happy to go on charging for the service and deflecting efforts to get a resolution.
eg http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5...
So, although I have been a generally happy customer for most of Vodafone's existence I think, in this aspect they share all the aspects of incompetence that certain people assume to be the sole preserve of government.
I cancelled service and a refund is very very slowly happening. (Vodafone gives you a credit but somehow fails to apply it to the account, as a matter of routine, so goes on taking new money.)
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
If you can make it work, you passed!
On the other hand, you're a hacker and probably a terrorist. So you failed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Are you expecting anything done for and by the government to live up to your standards? shame on you?
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'.
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!
Why is Snark Required?
... 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.
There is no need as corporations are in charge of government!
Yep, this is normal service in the UK. My broadband has been buggered since October, still no date for a fix. The government is no worse than, say, the average bank.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Have you tried ofcom/adjudicator, they sorted out my beef with Virgin Media pretty quickly (couple of months total).
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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"...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
When I was recently laid off and applied for unemployment, I discovered that signing up for unemployment requires MSIE. Well, a lot of sites say that, so i tried it in Firefox. It didn't work, the workflow just went in circles. Then I tried it in MSIE and found the same thing. However, when i read very carefully, I noticed that it said that it had to be a specific, no longer supported version of MSIE. I set the compatibility level to that version, and then it worked. But I am sure everybody that has been laid off from work knows how to override the automatic updating of MSIE and set the compatibility level back to an older version.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The government web site doesn't work with any operating system. It doesn't work with any version of the #1 most popular desktop operating system, Windows. It doesn't work with IE, Spartan, Chrome, or Firefox. The government web site plain refuses to work. And by the way, it's a web form a friggin form tag. Many eight-year-olds can build that and make it work.
You equate that with the private company's HARDWARE which works just fine with the predominant operating system, and also works just fine with some versions of minor operating systems. It just has an issue on one version of an OS that few people use. I use OS X, so it might bug me, but that's quite different from "doesn't work at all, under any OS.
The difference between government and big business is that if a business doesn't meet your needs you can go to a competitor that does, but if the government doesn't meet your needs you still have to keep giving them your money.
The business provides an service that you can choose whether or not to take, while the government will rob you of your freedom and your possessions if you fail to pay them for their services.
It's not brainless propaganda, any organisation that threatens to do you harm if you refuse to pay them is without doubt evil.
He said he tried XP. It won't install anything higher than IE8.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
In my opinion governments should require that their sites are passing the HTML Validator and CSS validator tests.
Genuine questions: Who do you think that would help, and why?
This kind of validation can be useful if you need to follow a standard for something to work. If browsers all followed proper de jure standards then this would offer a useful benefit for compatibility, particularly forward compatibility with future browsers.
Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up. (HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? If it changes arbitrarily then it's not a standard.)
The de facto standards that actually matter are how real browsers behave, which dictate whether your page looks right in the browsers your visitors are using today. Nothing else you do today is guaranteed to work tomorrow without regular attention anyway, which is foolish regression from the situation a few years ago for which we can thank Google and Mozilla, but it's the reality all the same.
In my entire career doing Web work -- which is measured in decades -- I'm not sure I have ever seen an example where a project was objectively better off because it routinely enforced having valid mark-up and stylesheets. I have, however, seen plenty of cases where someone has deliberately deviated from W3C standards for a specific, useful reason.
For example, Google have been known to omit mark-up that they were sure wasn't necessary in any browser in order to save a few bytes. Multiply those bytes by a bazillion visitors to their site every day and that's a lot of traffic saved overall. Another common case is trendy MVC frameworks like Angular, which often use non-standard attributes on HTML elements for their own purposes. They could use standard "data-*" attributes, but once you've got a few of those sitting on many elements in your mark-up, it's just noise and excess weight, so they use their own prefix for namespacing instead. And yet, I don't see anyone claiming that either Google's search engine or Angular as a JS framework have failed as a result of these heinous crimes...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.