Genius at work
by Volker Weber
KPMG's website as viewed in Internet Explorer and Mozilla. Who hires these guys?
[via Zeldmann]
Comments
Sounds like they believe in the Reverse Pareto Law - 80% of the browser users are quite enough, who needs the remaining 20%?
;-)
... or could it be a bug in Mozilla 1.01, since it seems to me that it displays fine in Windows using Mozilla 1.0, Opera and Netscape Communicator 4.7?
This may very well be the case. The 1.0 code stream is of much better quality than 1.1. The older version hardly ever crashed on me, while the new one has its share of bugs. I am contemplating to either downgrade or take the plunge into the 1.2 code stream which should build on a later branch than 1.1.
Actually I love sites like the KPMG one because I can see in an instant that I have to use IE. That's way better than sites like for example www.planethome.de which pretend to work with A-Browser-other-than-IE but simply won't. Same goes for many if not most Internet banking solutions.
Eric Meyer found out what the problem is:
Life is so damned ironic sometimes I have to pause in wonder. While taking a break from doing technical review on a book exhorting standards-based site design, I spotted on Zeldman (and he spotted it at Supafamous) a note that KPMG's Web site (as well as its Canadian counterpart) completely shatters in Mozilla, Netscape 6+, and basically any other non-IE browser. (Unless it's Opera, in which case they don't even let you in at all.)
Why does this happen? Bad browser sniffing. Somewhere on KPMG's server(s), a script looks at the user agent string of the browser asking for a page. For Gecko-based browsers like Mozilla et.al., this script decides that it's dealing with Netscape 4.x, and so hands over a script that's tuned for said browsers. An tiny little excerpt:
if (tar == 'A') {
document.layers['search_form'].document.forms['searchFormA'].submit();
} else {
document.layers['search_nav'].document.forms['searchFormB'].submit();
}
There's plenty of other broken stuff, like dynamically writing out layer elements and setting the visibility of said layers to hide, instead of the correct value, hidden.
This is a perfect example of why browser sniffing is nearly always a terrible idea: failure is never more than an unrecognized (or misidentified) browser away. I've taken a look at the page in Explorer, and I'm pretty sure the page can be rendered the way they want it in Gecko-based browsers. The question is this: should I invest the personal time and energy to offer them, for free, what Razorfish probably charged them a very large sum of money to not deliver?
In the end, thanks to my annoyingly ingrained sense of community good, I probably will. I'll let you know how it turns out. In the meantime, I have to get back to that technical review.
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