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

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

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?