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December 7, 2004
Corporate website decay
United Airlines doesn't have much extra money floating around these days, but is that an excuse for letting its website fall into a woeful state of disrepair?
For example, here's what United says if you click on the "Compatible browsers" link on their site:
The United Airlines web site is best accessed with one of the following (or other compatible) web browsers:* Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.0 to 4.7x
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or newerThe United Airlines web site does not currently function well with Netscape Navigator/Communicator version 6.X.
Netscape 4.x? Really?
Not only does this show that United's united.com folks don't really care about keeping up with the times, it shows a healthy disrespect for the significant and growing number of people using Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers.
When attempting to register for a flight status page, the webpage that supposedly allows me to do that comes up entirely blank in Firefox, yet it works in Internet Explorer. This is evidence that the united.com programmers employed IE-specific code rather than relying on universal HTML/W3C standards. Not a good approach, if you ask me (but then, nobody did).
So to all you corporate websites that still have "recommended browser" statements: get over yourself. Rework your site to rely on universal web standards and you'll no longer have to worry about the browsing tools your customers choose to rely on.