cos if the site made windoze users phone the 0870 number they would make more money.

How the hell can they cold-shoulder Linux users, when Linux users are most probably using Firefox or another SUPPORTED browser?

I fail to see the sense...

No reports on what happens when you spook the user-agent, or is pretending to the parcelforce website that you're running IE6 on XP even more unacceptable than picking up the phone and talking to a real human being?

Seem like yet another case of lazy web development, this time by Parcel Farce. My response to any company that can't accommodate my requests...move on to another that will.

Monkeyboy...because he really is evil you know :-)

Spectacular own goal. Who on earth would write their web app to specifically exclude Linux users? What possible motivation could they have for doing something like that. And crucially, is it hosted on LAMP etc?

I wouldn't even bother to complain. Let them fester in their own ignorance.

I use this site when I need to send a parcel. No problems with Linux:

http://www.parcel2go.com/

90% eh ? Solaris 2?, Irix?, HPUX?, SunOS?, BSD?, Gentoo?, Mandriva?, Ubuntu? OSX?, BeOS?, RedHat?,

No I think we've concluded that it doesn't support 90% of operating systems. Did ParcelFarce mean to say 90% of customer desktop machines?

Why do they need to care about the OS anyway? Their application runs in the browser and is quite happy to use Firefox. It's just that some clever idiot decided to check the OS and throw a wobbly when it doesn't see the magic word 'Windoze'. This is just sloppy programming by some Windoze shop.

Beware their customs payment page too - claims your transaction has failed but takes your money anyway, then lets you try again and again...

It's a web page. What does it matter what OS you are running on? Nonstandard HTML is an argument, of course, but they say that they support Firefox 1.0, so that's probably not the reason.

Specific DOM quirks? No - Firefox support again rules this out.

ActiveX components? Euucch. But, given the general level of clue displayed, this is possible.

On the plus side, I've never had to use them so far, and now I'll just go and use someone else if I can't get in.

Use someone else. Parcel farce tend to be more expensive I have found anyway.

I'm afraid this doesn't surprise me. Parcelforce has yet to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. What other courier service would send you a second class letter telling you that your parcel is in the local depot awaiting customs payments. My small business tries to avoid them for this reason. Either you sit on their track and trace facility (which is so brain dead that it can't even remove spaces from the tracking number) or you wait for an extra two days while your urgent package sits in the local depot waiting for you to turn up with your credit card.

Every other courier we use can either take a cheque when they deliver, or can deliver and charge afterwards. I'm afraid they deserve to fail.

So.... arcelforce blows off 10% of potential customers by designing their site for certain operating systems instead of open standards standards.

Doesn't this sort of mistake require a lot of effort to get properly wrong?

arcelforce won't last long if they make a policy of turning away 10% of business

Sam

If p'force is satisfied to serve 90% users they should not cry if they loose 10% of customers, are not they?

… they diverted the repaired palmtop that was being sent back to me (from New Zealand) through their VAT/duty collection procedures. The device was being returned to me after warranty repair, and was obviously not a new device that should be subject to these taxes. However, it is worth noting that Parcel Force themselves receive a hefty “administration fee” for VAT/duty items, and so obviously there is an incentive for them sending as many items as possible through this procedure.

No way was I going to pay about £50 for a device I already owned. I told them to send it back to New Zealand, as I would be back there a couple of months later, and could pick it up.

Two days after that, I was informed an empty box had arrived back in Auckland…

How about this?

Why don't you FreeTARDS get yourselves more than 1% of the operating system market and maybe you will get more than 1% of the development monies spent in the system dedicated to supporting you!

Oh wait because you guys want eveything to be free you guys aren't even the high volume big spenders customers worthy of dedicated funding support!

Curiously the Royal Mail website (www.royalmail.co.uk) is totally b0rked for me on Linux + Firefox, yet on Windows + Firefox it is fine. It's almost as if they are specifically breaking Linux support or something. Or maybe I've seen too many X-Files. Or maybe it's just my PC.

Not a programmer of sites I've wondered if there are any great obstacles to overcome in making a site work for all browsers and operating systems? Or is it just plain (calculated) laziness?

is there scope for a site dedicated to providing linux-friendly alternative service providers (cf @Tim) to sites which insist on Windows ... a bit or SEO and googling "Parcelforce Linux" returns Parcel2go ...

Do Parcelfarce allow people to use any colour of computer when connecting, or do they insist that they will only accept customers who use a standard beige box as that's 90% of computers?

"Why don't you FreeTARDS get yourselves more than 1% of the operating system market and maybe you will get more than 1% of the development monies spent in the system dedicated to supporting you!"

I believe the point here is that there is no additional effort required to support Linux/other OS. The effort seems to have been exerted to *prevent* use by anything other than a few OS/browser combinations.

Now, does that make any sense to you?

The Nationwide site just loops back to the login page with no error displayed if you try to login on a linux box.

I tried royalmail.co.uk from Ubuntu 8.04 and latest (stable) Firefox - EPIC FAIL. Site is totally broken. So then I used User Agent Switcher and switched to IE7. Guess what? Perfect.

No comments...

Two years ago I signed up with Parcelforce, and I've arranged the collection of several hundred parcels from my Linux machine. I simply changed the user agent string to read:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1 (actually running on Suse Linux 10.2)

The website worked perfectly after that.

"Why don't you FreeTARDS get yourselves more than 1% of the operating system market and maybe you will get more than 1% of the development monies spent in the system dedicated to supporting you!"

No idea why you're talking about 1% when Parcelforce themselves already admitted it's 10% they're not accommodating, which is not a percentage any good business would want to systematically exclude.

"Oh wait because you guys want eveything to be free you guys aren't even the high volume big spenders customers worthy of dedicated funding support!"

It doesn't work on iPhones either and, as mentioned above, has issues on Macs at crucial points (despite Macs being part of the 90% that Parcelforce thinks it DOES support). People who can afford these two devices are often known to fit into the "big spenders" category, so Parcelforce could actually benefit financially from a bit more funding in the cross-platform support area.

As is usual for all factless comments from angry trolls, you fail. Hard. Twice.

Yeah, I noticed this a while back, it does seem that they've gone out of their way to actually develop code to prevent Browser/OS combinations from accessing their services.

So I decided to go to the Post Office instead of using their dumb website, only to find that the real reason that we should be avoiding Parcelforce is the extortionate pricing.

Many people here and elsewhere wonder why GNU/Linux users get uptight since we are such a small percentage of the installed base. Some go on to point out that "you have to be really techie" to use it.

Now, if the second sentence has any truth, it's not bound up in the canard about printer drivers or command line, it's about others' failure to use standards. (Laziness, as already described above) The ordinary user gets their cheap netbook from Tesco or Asda and can't use it to send a parcel to their relatives.

They blame the computer, get one of those more expensive (not the really expensive ones...) ones, and so continue the status quo in which everyone ends up paying too much for software.

There are of course, other reasons why I think GNU/Linux based computers are a good idea.

It's wider than Parcelforce, and I could provide a list. Charities are the ones that I find particularly amazing, as you'd think they wouldn't do anything to exclude anyone.

For an illustration of how it should be done, nip over to the Central Office of Information and read their newly published website guidelines. They listened to us, we didn't rant and rave (it's on our website) we just asked for standards.

They agreed. Credit where credit is due. Just got to wait for the rest of the public sector to catch up :)

Proper standards, nothing more, is all that is required. We all know what that means, no cant about giving our customers "choice" in which "standards" to use. Tim Berners-Lee slagged that off in 1996, and I think we can all agree he knows a bit about it.

Gerry Gavigan

Open Source Consortium

Have a look at http://www.parcelforce.com/portal/pw/content2?catId=5800020&mediaId=10200111

"We are working on making our website more accessible following principles laid down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)."

Apart from the lunacy of that link pointing back to the page it is on, I suspect that the WAI does not require the restriction to a single browser.

Paris, because she knows only one way to do things.