The next step in the law school process is to fill out a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). I did the worksheet for this last night, using Apple Safari. So I just went to actually do the thing, again using Safari, and was told I was using, and I quote, “a non-certified browser.”
Now, I keep Flock (a Firefox deriviative) around for just this sort of thing, but it still grates on me when I’m told the default browser that ships with every Macintosh on the planet, and which most novice users will have neither the knowledge nor inclination to want to change, is insufficient. Especially given that most of the time, these sorts of messages are generated by javascript that is checking not for functionality, but rather a specific user-agent string in the HTTP headers (the string your browser uses to identify itself to the world).
Note that Safari is based on Apple’s WebKit rendering engine, which itself is based on KHTML, the HTML rendering engine built into the Konqueror web browswer included with KDE, the Linux desktop environment. I wonder how many Linux/Unix users are unable to access this form with their standard setup. (Thankfully, Firefox is also bundled with virtually every Linux distribution.)
It also shows bad design in general on the part of the web designers. I was able to do the worksheet and fill out the form to get my Department of Education PIN, with Safari, but not do the application. This is a rather silly inconsistency. I wonder how many calls the FAFSA support hotlines get from people confused about this.
I’ll be starting up Flock now, which like any Firefox related application is dog-slow and somewhat unstable on my (admittedly aging) system, and going to work on this application. Bad Department of Education. Bad. No cookie.
Rant over. I think I’d like some cheese now.
[tags]fafsa, interoperability, safari, mac, firefox, khtml, flock[/tags]