Argentine Online Supermarket Bans Firefox

Thanks Ken.

Unbelievably it's IE6 that they mandate (check www.discovirtual.com.ar, footer), that old and clumsy piece of software. Not even IE7.

Our NGO has kept a steady purchase level from Disco of around 4000 dollars a month for the last five years. This is a big client for Argentine standards (admittedly not a big *corporate* client though).

Of course they are leaving out a big share of their customer base. I explained this to Disco over the phone and on a help chat system. They just tell us they don't know what to do. This alone speaks volumes about their insight in business...

Thanks for the hint about reporting broken web sites. I will do that right now.

Please let the voice of Firefox be heard! Email laempresa@disco.com.ar asking for Firefox-accessibilty!

While I was writing this reply, I thought that
I'd check out the site. First in Firefox with only one other tab open and it made Firefox drag badly. I then tried it in IE7 (tab) and Firefox froze up.

The money that you are sending them is substantial, but it really is not worth doing business with a company that has such disregard for their customers.

Microsoft comes to mind when I say that.
While it's true that they should make their site accessible to all regardless of what browser that they use, this site and company's business practices are awful to say the least.

When I find a site or service that doesn't work with Firefox, I go find another. There's more than 64 million sites online, I don't waste my time on sites that live in the stone ages.

It'll take time, but that company will eventually feel the loss of those that they are excluding.

Sorry, this is bad news for you.

That *is* bad news, Ken. Thank for your time.

Can you suggest where can I ask an active involvement of Firefox community in order to start an email campaign about it? I want to promote freedom of choice among browsers, and in particular I want to promote Firefox. 

This would be the place.
Your situation, well, it's our situation is a total uphill battle as it is like getting people to use Firefox over IE.

Unfortunately, the community picks and chooses
what campaigns that it wants to get behind. It's all on a personal interest level basis.

In your situation though, you'd have to try and find others who use that site to get behind you and take action.
There's always campaigns being proposed here and sometimes the amount of them gets overwhelming.
But with the SFx site changes ahead, it'll be easier to start a campaign and hopefully get support for it.
I feel for you and the situation really stinks.
If it were Yahoo! doing this, then you'd hear an uproar, but it's not. It's mostly personal to you. It's unfair and plain wrong, but it is what it is.
I'm not saying that it's hopeless at all, I'm just saying that it's a tough battle and you're going to have to be persistent in your e-mails and for drumming up support.
The least I can do is send an e-mail.
I'll try, but it could just get chewed up by a spam monster and never reach the proper authorities.

But explain to me what prevents you from using the site to order?
Remember, I couldn't even get to the site.

Thanks Ken. My best guess about this problem is just laziness and shortsightedness from the supermarket chain. They just told their webdesigners / webprogrammers to renew the site.

Those young and probably illiterate hackers made the changes, tried the result using just IE6, they even came to notice that the site was now incompatible with IE7 (not to mention Opera, Firefox, etc, which they never heard of) and "fixed it" by attaching an "optimized for IE6" warning in the bottom.

I have analysed their code and of course it is far from validating. They have been particularly lazy about checking their javascript syntax. Firefox is unforgiving (standard-enforcing) for this. IE7 seems to be a bit more unforgiving than IE6. IE6 forgives every sin. So they just dont need to make any more work. They have found the one browser that can be used to buy from the. It's the client's job to get that browser and forget about all the others.

As a result, when trying to purchase using Firefox, some javascript code does nothing.

Thanks for your support. Please try to email them.