This is something that has been written about many, many times already, but I have to vent my frustations!

I have just been trying to look at a planning application on the Gloucestershire County Council website. I use Linux so also use Firefox to browse (although, even if I was on another OS, why use anything different?). Most of the site works OK with Firefox, but there is a section I need to get to to view some documents. I click the button and get a 404.

Predictably, calling the council helpline puts me in touch with someone with less computer knowledge than your average family pet, who informs me that I need to reboot (!!) and then enable popups. I didn’t bother continuing that particular conversation.

A quick look at the page source revealed hardly any HTML but mostly Javascript – bet this has been coded for IE I thought.

Only way to check was to relunctantly fire up IE using the excellent IE for Linux package. Sure enough, the page worked. Looking through the help on the site, it says that the site is best viewed with IE 5.5 (!!) or later.

Why, in this day and age, is this still happening – why are people coding for one browser only – is this laziness, corporate blindness or does someone really think IE 5.5 is a decent piece of software?

Even more frustrating in this case is that the software has been paid for using various taxes that I have paid and I should be able to view the site on a browser of my choice.

This problem, continuing to occur in the relatively mature desktop browser environment, is only going to get worse with the vast variety of mobile devices that are on the market. If people would stick to the standards and not invent their own then at least we would only have to deal with browser bugs instead of shoe horning sites into different standards.

There, that feels better – rant over.