ICAO website not available for multi-platform access

[bluesideoops]

Surprised to find that the Flight Safety website: FSIX Home has been developed only for access on MS Explorer and has a pop-up warning stating this. Frankly, this is both ridiculous and totally unnacceptable for our overlords not to provide this with multi-platform/browser access. Have any of the clowns in ICAO actually ever worked in aviation and noticed the rapid pace of change and the fact that most pilots access the web from iPad, iPhones and other similar mobile devices and are probably not running an MS based browser. Any thoughts?

[Heathrow Harry]

It tells you an awful lot about the type of people they have in both management & IT - stuck in the dark ages and believe they can dicatate to users

and what happens when they do an upgrade and cut off IE by accident?

this happened two weeks ago on the YOUSENDIT site for sending big files - no IE, no Firefox, no safari - but it works OK in Chrome..... and its still out for IE

[green granite]

urprised to find that the Flight Safety website: FSIX Home has been developed only for access on MS Explorer Frankly, this is both ridiculous and totally unnacceptable for our overlords not to provide this with multi-platform/browser access.

That's not quite what it says bluesideoops it actually says:

"Please note that this Site was developed and tested for MS Internet Explorer

Display quality and functionality are not guaranteed when using other internet browsers"

It works perfectly well with FireFox, well for me it does anyway.

[mixture]

Frankly, this is both ridiculous and totally unnacceptable for our overlords not to provide this with multi-platform/browser access.

Its a frequently occurring problem.

The developers know the client will be testing on IE because that's what's installed on their corporate desktops, the client doesn't know any better and doesn't spec for multi-browsers.

As a result, the developer has an easy job.

You see, the problem with multiple browsers is that all browsers interpret certain aspects in a different manner (primarily related to layout). Its not rocket science to work around these little niggles.... but it does require a period of code tweaking and testing.

In the case of IE, it might also be the case that the developers have existing code they want to re-use that's written for proprietary Microsoft technologies (e.g. Silverlight etc.).

Yes, I know IE has the largest market share due to its inherent availability on Windows. But I agree that in this day and age, on a commercial project, its pretty much unforgivable not to at least provide some degree of cross-platform compatability.

[Bushfiva]

FSIX is on the legacy site. The main site is somewhat better. The legacy site seems to function marginally better in FF than in IE10, and some people might get a giggle looking at the source and contrasting the programming style of where much of the source comes from with what the popup says.

Judging by the redirect, I'd guess FSIX will be on the main site at some point in the future. Methinks OP has had several years to get upset about this.

[bluesideoops]

Overlords?

From experience I would say that there are many experienced aviation professionals in the Organization. Although what that really has to do with designing or managing the website, I am not sure.....

Lookingforajob - it has everything to do with it - access should be available for at least all of the major browsers and tested for MSIE essentially means that no consideration has been given to MAC users, who constitute a huge number of users. The plan should have been to make it as accessible as possible since it is critical SAFETY information.

I worked in eCommerce Marketing in the late 90's early 2000's and even at that point we were producing for multi-platform access which wasn't really that hard.

I am sure there are many experienced aviation professionals in the organisation but they need to expand their knowledge and skills if they are going to 'fly a desk' and operate websites (in my case, I was a Marketing professional not from a IT background but I still had to understand and be aware of the capabilities and the demands of the market).

Like I say, this is the 21st Century and they seem to be trailing far behind - remember what they tell you as a pilot 'fly the aeroplane, don't let it fly you!'