Citifi.com Denies Alternate Browser Access

Mr. Magoo writes "Citifi.com, CitiBank's new financial services portal, is the latest big web site non-Windows users can't access." When I view the site with Netscape under Windows, I get a marketing blurb that says 'Become a Citi f/i customer and enjoy the convenience of being able to bank, invest, and pay bills 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from any PC that's connected to the Internet.' Tried it with Netscape 4.05 and M12 under Linux, and I get no dice. Lynx 2.82rel.1+ssl under Linux seems okay, though. It seems we've got another poor-web-design victim.

Comments

Hey - I found another one!

[Matt2000]

Hey guys, it looks like this problem is everywhere. My grandmother just put up a site to show her recipes for cookies that she gives to orphans. Not only that, the damn site doesn't support Netscape 2.x OR Quicken for Windows 3.11!

Dudes its time for some serious hacking. Get her.

I've also got some rumours of a Lisa Loeb fan page that won't let any small mouth bass view the site. That's only a rumour right now though, let's not get all worked up over nothing.


Hotnutz.com

This isnt right...

[iCEBaLM]

I just checked it out, try this guys...

Turn on cookies and go to www.citifi.com and you'll get the lame "We dont support anything but windows or macos, go away" message. Then click on "About Citifi" at the bottom, suddenly you get access to the navigation bar at the left, and the one at the top right, which offers you to check out their entire website, INCLUDING:

A Home link which takes you to their main page

A Products and Services page

A Signup to be come a new member page

And to even "sign in" to your account

(Direct Links not included because their site runs on https with cookies and it seems without seeing the "disclamer" that your OS isn't supported, it does not work.)

And more, it looks like you can navagate the ENTIRE page REGARDLESS that it says you're unsupported.

So the 64 thousand dollar question is.....

Why have the disclamer that non-Windows and non-MacOS users are unsupported if they can, even with the disclamer page, navigate the entire site?

-- iCEBaLM

Sorry, wrong answer . . .

[fireproof]

Not to try to knock your answer-- it ought to be that easy. That's the logical way to solve it. But, I've had the same experience as the guy who you're responding to. It's not that easy. I tried to explain that it would look different in different browsers, tried to explain about CSS and all that jazz, and even finally tried your trick. I showed 'em the site I was working on using a 98 box on Netscape 4.6, a 95 box with IE 5.0, a Mac with IE 4.0, and Linux box (mine) with Netscape 4.7, and finally Linux running Mozilla M9 (I think) and it turned out that "Internet Explorer is right. The others are all wrong." This despite the fact that IE on the Mac looked different from IE on a Win box. And nevermind that Mozilla is the most CSS compliant browser around. After all, hey, Netscape (and by extension Mozilla) is dead. Gone. Bye-bye. Later.

Sheesh, it drives me up the wall.

"Make sure our site ranks high on search engines. Make sure you repeat keywords in the meta tags." (Like they know what a META tag does) . . . How do you explain to somebody that it ain't that easy, and that repeating keywords kills your ranking?

"I don't like where that line breaks!" Like I can really have a lot of control over that. Say some user who has increased his font size comes along. The text breaks in some odd place for him.

"Make sure you test those CGI scripts on Windows and Macintosh!" Like the browser really affects the way the CGI script operates.

And, of course, as the guy mentioned, there is always the "You need to move faster!" When I'm trying to kick the bugs outta a script. Then, if I get rushed into putting the script into action without adequate debugging, it's my fault because it wasn't right before it went live.

Where does this all end? I don't know. I think that some of the stuff you can create with Shockwave/Director/Whatever is cool. Quicktime movies and RealAudio are neat. We can do neat stuff with the web that wasn't possible four years ago. But, we're losing sight of the original purpose of the internet -- to allow information to be accesible to lotsa folks in a platform-independent way. It's easy to ignore part of the population (those who use Lynx, those who use Linux, or even those who don't want to install Shockwave on their computer) since they may not make up a large percentage of the population, but that doesn't make it right. I know we'll never go back to that completely, but I just wish people would TRY to understand that before they go deciding what, why, when, and how they want their website to look and act.

Sorry, I know a lot of that was off-topic, but I've been steaming over some of it for a while, and this thread provided an opportunity to vent a bit.

What should you do about this sort of thing...?

[Kris_J]

Having worked 18 months in a bog-standard, IQ-challenged real estate company where managers call the Web "Netscape" I ask; What can we/you/I actually do about these sort of things? The problem is that technical decisions are being made by people with no technical knowledge. Directors ask for features in web stuff that only exists in IE5, and any web developer will describe as unreliable or a kludge. I regularly have users & managers tell me that something on my web stuff should be "moved a little to the right". I have to design brochures using a database that can output simple HTML, and they have to look perfect regardless of how big the headings are ("maybe we should make the font a bit smaller") or how small they are ("Gee, there's a lot of white space, maybe we should make the font a bit larger") or regardless of 20 other attributes that could vary hugely. They even want be to be able to control page break, on a web browser! I wouldn't be able to do half the stuff I'm told to do if I couldn't specify the browser - I know I'd be getting Javascript errors and display weirdness if I had to even support two different browsers, never mind completely different OSs.

People like you and I probably don't give a crap how it looks, as long as it works and the information is there, but computer illiterate managers only have the surface looks to judge by. Heck, when I was developing the code in the background I was accused of moving too slowly, but once I was working on the cute interface I was suddenly moving at a blistering pace - fact is I was working at the same quick speed the whole time.

Managers of companies appear to believe the world revolves around them. When I told one that a feature he wanted was not supported by the HTML standards he actually asked me to get them changed.

So, the question is; How do we inform computer illiterate managers that the Web is a collaberative community of standards, rather than a dictatorship governed by high school bully tactics?