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Actually, (speaking of MVP) it didn't work with: Navigator, Opera, Konqueror, w3m, links.. I don't use Opera, don't like it that much either.
The trick is I don't have flash installed, and there's no real great way to get flash running on FreeBSD (short of downloading an outdated version of Netscape for Linux and using the Linux flash plugin). None of the content on MVP's web site actually required required flash (it was all simply text and images, nothing that needed to be interactive). However, instead of using some trivial javascript to handle the images, and exposing some sort of purely HTML based navigation as a backup, MVP hid all the links behind some flash monstrosity. The flash stuff didn't even look nice, and the site was completely useless without it. Not only is that a great example of bad site design, they probably paid a large amount of money for someone to create a site like that. So how do they make it back? By charging more money for their products.
Not running flash is not an indication that I'm not interested in buying MVP products, nor is it an indication that I'm too cheap (I've got various legal copies of Win95, 98 and 98SE floating around).
IPD was operating their shopping cart stuff with an unsigned SSL certificate. This would cause most browsers (unless configured otherwise) to send up a warning. What happens when the someone hijacks the site (given that they're running IIS, I wonder how unlikely this really is) and end-user is used to seeing warnings about a bogus certificate and just clicks his/her way through and hands his/her credit card number to whomever hijacked the site?
Basically they were too lazy (or cheap) to take the proper steps. I also got the impression that whomever they hired to do web design didn't know how to create (rather.. buy) the proper certificate. If I'm going to fork over a credit card number, I want them to do it right. If they can't see the importance in having a properly signed certificate, which should be blatantly obvious to anyone running an 'e-commerce' site, I wonder what other obvious stuff they just don't get. Also, that previous design for their site was, IMO, difficult to use even with a 'supported' browser.. and more difficult to use than the layout that came before it. Their latest design is quite a step in the right direction.
- alex
'85 244 Turbo
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