Emil Lerch

Husband, Father, Technologist, Cloud Architect

When bad decisions collide

Sometimes this stuff drives me nuts…I get an email with a link, but the URL itself is attached to a graphical button, and Outlook doesn’t let me copy the hyperlink off an image. I click the button, which launches my default browser (firefox), which the site doesn’t support, so they redirect me to URL/unsupportedbrowser.aspx in a way that doesn’t allow me to hit the back button to see the original URL.

In fact, the application, which literally includes a button that adds you to a list of people attending a meeting, does NOT actually support firefox. I have to assume the time they spent coding in a nice “your browser is unsupported” message far outweighed the time it would have taken to support a firefox user clicking a single button, but that’s another gripe session. For some reason, this particular app also crashes firefox when I add the site to the IE Tab Sites filter and let IE run the app.

My easiest method for dealing with this situation (without changing default browsers just for this scenario), is to change my firefox user agent, let the broken application load, and copy/paste the URL into a real IE.

Not until crazy stuff like this is resolved will average users really pick up firefox. Well, that and getting the browser pre-installed on machines. ;-)