Two Slashes

In accordance with my parents’ work, they often get recommendations for this service or that to make the redundant tasks a lot easier, or the company as a whole decides that everyone should be using this or that, and guides everyone into transitioning.  Such is any business, really, but for the sake of my post, I digress.

It was with one of these recommendations that I was stopped this morning by my mother asking me if their business PC had IE 5 or greater and “something called JavaScrip” (yes, she missed the ‘T’) installed.  This being a crappy XP rig running (and forever to my shame) AOL 9.1, naturally, it did.  She proceeded to go through a few more steps before the site decided she needed to install several random ActiveX controls to continue – something that never happened.

Running any of these sites through Firefox, or any other alternative browser, you’ll quickly find that they’re not particularly keen on you even visiting them with the “filth that isn’t IE.”  At times, they’ll even make up excuses (like the one displayed here about how JavaScript is a requirement, even though the error message is being displayed using a short user-agent-checking script) just to make sure you turn around, fire up Internet Exploder, and come back riding a piece of Swiss cheese.

You see, at least from my experiences playing with and setting up all of these services for my parents, I’ve found that there’s one thing they all have in common:  They all require Internet Explorer for “compatibility reasons” and each site comes with more effluent to install than AOL itself.  To be honest, it’s quite irritating having to diagnose issues with these, because they have a tendency to go AWOL (not to be confused with the ISP?) all the time.

Let’s take that “compatibility” notion for a moment, mix in the required ActiveX, and analyze it further.  Do you really want to know what a bunch of these controls are for?  Image uploading (and resizing), mere basic text editing…I could go on forever listing this stuff, but essentially it’s all things that could be taken care of in any other manner of more portable, usable manner…and without all of the bloat.  Heck, some of these are even uglier than Windows ME!

It’s pitiful that everyone needs to resort to some client-side browser helper to provide functionality that has long since been capable by more portable methods, such as the use of a Flash or Java applet.  With either of those, there’s plenty of room and cross-platform compatibility to spare, and it wouldn’t tax anything more than it already is.  Flickr, for example, has an excellent upload and management system; while I’m not expecting every little feature of Flickr to show up on in a business tool, it’s at least worth pointing out that there are working, real-life examples with the kind of portability and scalability that these costly services should be striving for.

One would think that, with the growing market share of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and increasing presence of nearly-fully-capable devices like the iPhone and other smartphones, businesses aimed at enterprises and the employees of those corporations would be falling head over heels to make sure that their platforms worked on as many devices and from as many points of accessibility as possible.  But apparently I’m thinking wrong.  Web 2.0?  Maybe for the personal side of life…but as far as I’m concerned, work is still a version behind.