Aside from just using Apple’s Boot Camp to select which OS I wanted to use the next time I started the computer, I also installed rEFIt, a boot-loader that will let me select which OS I want as I start the system, and VMWare Fusion, so that I can run WinXP from within OSX.

From my experience with with a dual-boot WinXP and Ubuntu Linux laptop, I wasn’t looking forward to sharing files between the 2 systems by setting up an antediluvian FAT32 partition. However, one of my friends recommended MacDrive, a program that allows Windows to read from and write to an HFS+ volume. Magic, right?

Everything was looking rosy, until I decided to be stingy and give Windows XP a 10 GB partition.

The system requirements for Windows XP indicate that a minimum of 1.5 GB drive space is needed. People have installed XP on 4GB Asus eees, so I actually thought I was being generous by giving over 6 times the minimum.

The problem, in this case, doesn’t have anything to do with Microsoft. My three biggest problems so far have been with Chrome, Dropbox, and Open Office. The first 2 don’t seem to offer the user the choice of selecting a custom install location, and install on the Windows partition by default. Open Office just didn’t take to being installed on the MacDrive volume–I haven’t figured it out beyond that.

You might be thinking, how much space can Chrome possibly use? It’s the sleekest browser around, right? I don’t know if it was the recent updates that did it, but the Chrome application was hogging 118 MB for the application–Firefox uses 27 MB, by comparison–and other files in my Application Data folder were taking up nearly a gigabyte of space.

Dropbox is a slick program that allows you to map a folder on your system to space in the cloud. You can drop-and-drag your files just like with any other Windows folder, but the files are stored on a server, and are accessible to you via a password-protected web page, or via any other computer where you install the Dropbox software. A change to the web interface or to a folder on any one system is automatically synchronized with the other systems. Even though I had put my local Dropbox repository on the MacDrive volume, the software itself was on the Windows partition, along with a heft chunk (~500 MB) of cache data, again, in the Application Data folder.

Before long, I was getting messages about low disk space on the Windows volume every few minutes. I tried to uninstall Open Office Writer, the only component of Open Office I originally had room to install, to free up 300 MB, and was informed that there wasn’t enough drive space to uninstall it. The irony! At one point, I had 0 KB free on my Windows volume. I managed to delete a few files until I could uninstall Open Office and Chrome.

On top of that, when running Windows XP in VMWare Fusion, Windows can’t access the MacDrive volume. Since that’s where I installed all my Windows software, I can run Windows in OSX, but I can’t run any of my Windows software.

How much space is enough space for your Windows partition? It’s hard to say. If you really want to run Windows from within VMWare Fusion, you should probably give it a sizable partition. Otherwise, I hope that giving it an extra 15 GB would be sufficient. Why be stingy when drive space is so cheap? Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I prefer lean software to bloated. Can you imagine installing Chrome from floppies? Remember the The 5K Awards, for web sites that could pack a punch in mere kilobytes? OK, maybe we don’t need to be that sparing with our drive space, but a little efficiency would go a long way.

In particular, the browsers that are not compatible with the U-M jobs site are Safari, Chrome, and Opera — browsers typically used by more tech-savvy users — so U-M may be missing out on the very candidates best-suited for work in today’s web-based world.

The first thing to note is the warning on the interstitial page, the page between the user and the content:
“Supported browsers are: Windows 2000 and XP – Internet Explorer version 7.0. MAC OSX – Safari versions 1 and 2. (Safari 3.0 for Mac is not supported).”

It’s in small type and can easily be overlooked by a focus-driven person who is here to look for jobs postings, not browser recommendations. Not that I think there is any excuse for not supporting all major, modern browsers, but this page could at least include a browser-detection script that would alert users of unsupported browsers in a prominent manner. It might as well also mention that Javascript needs to be enabled. No matter, though, because the next click will let Safari, Chrome, and Opera users know in bold black text on a plain white background:

// Start Req. No 3294 Bug No 21869,21870 This site is designed to work with Microsoft Internet Explorer (versions 5.5, 6.0, 7.0), Netscape (versions 7.0, 7.1) and Mozilla (version 1.7) Web browsers installed with the Microsoft Windows operating system, and Safari (version 1.2) Web browser installed with the Mac operating system. The browser and/or operating system that you are using to access this site is not currently supported. Please access this site from a device with a supported browser and operating system combination. // End Req. No 3294 Bug No 21869,21870

Friendly, isn’t it? It looks more like a browser error than a message from the U-M jobs site. A lot of people might see “Bug No 21869,21870″ and assume the site is temporarily down.

Job searchers are a persistent bunch, though, and presumably many of them will read through the error message and decide to revisit the site in Internet Explorer. Mac users may have a harder time following the recommendation, as Apple likes to push out Safari updates. You can download old versions of Safari, but that’s not something we can expect every job searcher to do, much less be aware of.

Once you do get to the jobs search page in (in Internet Explorer or Firefox), you get a frameset consisting of 5 frames, none of which have titles (from Creating Accessible Frames: “One of the most important things you can do to increase the accessibility of frames is to give each frame a title.”). The links on the footer frame, such as the link to the non-descrimination statement, do not have a target attribute set to “_top” and therefore open in the same frame, one line of text high.

There is a logo on the page: “Powered by Deploy Solutions TM, Copyright 2004 Deploy Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.” 2004? Maybe it’s time to upgrade.

In my recent post about T-Mobile, the cost of browser incompatibility was expensive and avoidable phone calls to customer services. Here, the cost is arguably even higher: missing out on the best job candidates. That might be more difficult to pin a dollar amount to, but if I were U-M I would be worried–and I would fix it.

Edit:
I e-mailed U-M about these issues and received the following in their response: “There are no plans to upgrade this until the system is replaced in June of 2010.” Although that’s nearly a year away, I’m glad to know that they are planning to replace it.

T-Mobile's default page in Chrome, post login

After several unsuccessful attempts to view info for her line from several different screens, we called T-Mobile’s customer support. The service rep walked through the same steps and said, “OK, now you should see tabs on the left with your names, phone numbers, and ‘Add A Line’.”

That’s when it hit me. I should try a different browser.

The same page in Firefox:

T-Mobile's default page in Firefox, post login

(The big ‘Image Not Available’ is a different matter–that’s because my phone, in spite of the fact that I bought it from T-Mobile, is almost 4 years old, and therefore no longer exists from the perspective of their web site. Planned obsolescence at its finest.)

The same issue affects Safari, the default browser on the Mac. According to one browser statistics report, Chrome and Safari accounted for 9.1% of traffic in June 2009. Stats for a site I work with show 13.6% of visitors use Chrome or Safari (presumably due to a higher Mac userbase).

If we the relevant sections of the web site had been accessible to us, T-Mobile could possibly have avoided an expensive customer service call. Making your web site cross-browser compatible is worth money.

One last comment: what if Javascript is turned off? Does the T-Mobile site degrade gracefully?

T-Mobile's site with Javascript disabled

The site, which relies heavily on Javascript and AJAX, becomes completely unusable.

Slashdot's RSS feed in IE6 and Chrome, respectively

Either way is completely intimidating to an RSS novice. Fortunately, we can change that.

Both IE6 and Chrome will apply an XSL stylesheet, if one is specified. To specify a stylesheet, insert the following code right after the DTD:
<?xml-stylesheet href="rss2.xsl" type="text/xsl" media="screen"?>

I created a bare-bones XSL file to transform RSS 2.0 files:
rss2.xsl

Voila! The RSS feed now displays some information telling the user what RSS is and how to use it.

Of course, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, and other modern browsers give the user some pretty click options that allow them to add the feed to their RSS reader of choice with the click of a button. There’s really no reason we couldn’t add code to achieve the same effect to our XSL file. For example, just view the generated source (using a tool like the Web Developer Toolbar) of an RSS feed displayed in Firefox and copy or further customize the code.

(I’m sure I’ll get to that in my copious free time.)

This brings up a good question in my mind, though: why do the modern browsers override publisher-specified XSL stylesheets? I’ll admit that it adds a certain helpful consistency to all RSS feeds, but it seems peculiar. I suppose that since so few RSS feeds have custom XSL stylesheets, it is better to apply a single style to all. It’s an idea that is bad in theory, but good in practice.

(And you can always change your Firefox settings to customize how it handles Web Feeds. I thought I could trick it into displaying my styled feed, but I recommend against using Firefox to open web feeds with Firefox: I started an infinite loop.)