On top of all their other sins (causing wildfires, charging ratepayers for judgments against them due to said fires, charging ratepayers for improvements so that they won’t cause wildfires, etc.) I found out yesterday that the bill-paying system of AT&T (northern California) only accepts Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome for windows machines. Plus Apple Safari.
Fortunately, I don’t have to access this system very often. I still think it stinks.
User Agent Switcher:
Thanks for the suggestion, but it sort of misses my point (which I did not express clearly). I think it stinks that a public utility refuses to recognize any browsers except those from the giant corporations who already control the internet and so much of its content, thereby further strengthening their hold on the masses.
The CA PUC seems to be deeply in the pockets of the Utility companies.
Step 1- the Utility company does something stupid, causing misery and damages.
2 The company is then fined for that misery and damaages.
The Utility company goes whining to the PUC, complaining that they can’t pay their execs huge bonuses nor their shareholders.
The pUC allows them to raise their rates.
To me, Chrome is the best browser, what do you use?
I have a similar issue with accessing my online account with the Raleigh News & Observer. There’s no problem with accessing the articles or the eEdition, but if I want to check the status of my subscription or request a delivery hold I need to log on using Chrome. Using FireFox results in the online equivalent of eternal hold music.
FWIW, those three browsers, combined, account for 90% of web usage in the U.S. Safari is at 32%, but I’m pretty sure that a significant portion of that is being driven by iPhones and iPads. Firefox is a distant fourth, at 5%. I imagine it’s a matter of not being willing to do optimization for minor platforms.
For non-mobile devices, those same three are still at 89%, though Chrome, alone, is 60% of that.
Source: Browser Market Share United States Of America | Statcounter Global Stats
I am on Opera, which works fine virtually everywhere else. I used to be on Chrome, but I don’t like the feeling of being followed everywhere. It’s probably a vain and foolish goal, but I like to do what I can to spike their guns and foil their hegemony.
Virtually everywhere else I go and pay money online has no problem whatever with my browser (Opera). That’s another reason this stinks, everyone else can do it, why can’t you (AT&T)? Oh, yeah, you’re a stinking monopoly who doesn’t lose customers when you don’t recognize their browser.
I pay online through Firefox, no problems. Central Valley, Ca.
is this recent?
Blocking any browser is just bad practice on the web. If a particular browser lacks a feature you need, you test for the feature. That way the browsers have to keep up.
That said, I have encountered the above, where a feature was not found, and it will say something about your browser being incompatible, and a browser that does have the feature. And often that browser is often Chrome or Edge.
This only happened when using older versions of browsers, though. Or when using Internet Explorer, whcih hasn’t been updated in quite a while.
Yeah, don’t design for browsers. Design for the HTML standard. If a browser doesn’t want to follow the HTML standard, that’s their own fault… but the vast majority of them do.
If they’re only allowing Chrome and Edge, I’m surprised that hasn’t landed them in hot water with the ADA. Blind people often use specialty browsers.
What does “only recognizes” mean? I’ve accessed sites that complain that I’m using an unsupported browser, but if I just ignore that message and continue, I have never actually had any problem. Does the site actually fail to function when accessed with an “unsupported” browser?
I just realized I wrote “AT&T” when I meant PG&E. Sorry for any confusion that caused.
You have a point. The message says “Your browser is unsupported. Please use a different browser. To learn more, visit [link]” I clicked on the link and read their short list of supported browsers, but I just took their word for it and cranked up Chrome for long enough to do the business I needed to do. So I tried it with Opera just now, and it does seem to work.
Is this where I say “Never mind?”
I suspect that this means that “we’ve only tested and optimized our website for these three browsers; we can’t guarantee that it’ll work properly with another browser. So, be forewarned.”
I primarily use Firefox, and every once in a while, I find myself on a website where some function won’t work properly; in those cases, I try it in Chrome, and it works just fine. Probably a similar thing with PG&E.
This is an idealistic stance that sounds good but just doesn’t work in the real world. If I’m writing the web site for a bank and I write some code that should work according to the spec, but doesn’t work in Chrome, I can’t just tell the customers “this should work; it’s Chrome’s fault that it doesn’t”. The bank’s customers don’t give a crap about any spec, they just need to access their accounts, and me pointing fingers at the browser is just going to lose customers even if in theory I’m right.
This is my suspicion too. They probably have a QA process that demands some testing for every “supported” browser and the budget was only there to do that testing for the big three.
Public utilities are not know for their sophisticated web presence.
I suspect PG&E are farming out their bill-paying utility; this one is suspiciously similar to the one used by the local water and sewer board.
So maybe another generalization is appropriate: bill-pay sites that specialize in public utilities don’t have to care as much about a sophisticated web presence as they would for other types of customers. The only worse ones I have encountered are medical bill-pay sites.
This is true. But, in the real world today, all of the major browsers have agreed to try and follow the specs, and to use special prefixes when they innovate and try new things not on the spec. And also, the real world contains many bank websites that do follow the spec. Bank websites generally aren’t using the leading edge new stuff. And, if they are, they know how to do graceful fallback.
It’s why the OP’s situation seems so strange. I can’t think of any reason why a utility company would need the latest and greatest, either. I can’t think of a good reason they would even think they need to use browser detection.
I’m sure it’s just what kenobi_65 suggested above: they tested their site against a certain set of browsers, and they want to disclaim responsibility for whether it works on other browsers that they haven’t tested. It costs just as much to fully test a site against a niche browser used by 0.1% of the population as it does to test it against Chrome. And it’s easy to tell your developers “don’t use leading edge stuff”; it’s less easy to exactly quantify that. I’ve written plenty of Javascript programs that I thought were using simple well-supported features, and then discovered that browser X behaves differently than browser Y when a feature is used in a certain way, or when multiple features interact.
I was confused because threads about AT&T are normally in the Pit.