Morph3ous’s Weblog

I followed the the advice of a user of digg, Sillywampa, on Digg’s entry about my earlier post on Florida’s People First Job Portal and emailled PeopleFirst@dms.myflorida.com about this issue. Here is what I wrote:

I am writing to ask that you please allow users of the Firefox web browser to access the People First employment website. There is a script that runs and checks the user agent of the browser accessing the site. The script checks for Internet Explorer >5 but <7, and >Netscape Navigator 6.2.

Netscape Navigator 6.2 and Mozilla Firefox use the same page layout engine. This means that if the site works in one, it will also work perfectly in the other. The work to make the page compatible has already been done, and would simply require a change to the script that checks the browser’s user agent.

The problem is especially important because the current state of the site locks out almost 100% of Mac users. The version of Internet Explorer for the Mac has been discontinued by Microsoft. Most Mac users use either Safari, or Firefox.

This site will also be hard to access once Microsoft has released the final version of Internet Explorer 7. Initial reports by users browsing with the beta version are that the script blocks them as well.

I have posted an article about this on my blog, and it has also gotten a lot of attention on the social bookmarking website Digg.

My blog entry:
http://www.morph3ous.net/2006/08/25/state-of-florida-job-portal-shuts-out-alternative-browsers/

Digg entry:
http://digg.com/apple/Use_a_Mac_or_Firefox_You_can_t_apply_for_a_job_with_the_State_of_Florida

Please give this issue some consideration, and let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Update: I received this response…

Looks like they are not going to even look into this, and that the site is either wholly or in part outsorced to convergys.