Early this morning, Nicola was bugging me to add a data plan to her phone account in anticipation of receiving her shiny new MyTouch. We logged on to the site using our favored browser, Google’s Chrome. Here’s what we found:
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:
(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?
The site, which relies heavily on Javascript and AJAX, becomes completely unusable.
I also have the same exact problem. Worse, a lot of account features on a mobile device aren’t available on mine through T-Mobile, on my blackberry.
I also got absolutely nothing helpful from customer support on the issue, though not through lack of trying on their part.
Same problem here. You can go to https://my.t-mobile.com/Pda/ to at least pay your bill online but nothing else. So far my switch to T-Mobile has been less than stellar, no online access on my computers (All Macs & Linux) and spotty data service let alone 3G. Get what you pay for I suppose.
I couldn’t believe it when I tried accessing T-mobile.com using Chrome. I didn’t get the image/flash on the main site, much less logon. I had to Google it to see if I was the only one and thus I landed on your website.
How scary that a large company like T-mobile can’t make a more browser independent website. Granted Chrome isn’t that popular (being honest, here) but I should at least be able to see the main page correctly.
It’s now the end of 2016, and the T-Mobile website is still unfriendly to Safari. Whenever I have to add money to my account, I must switch to using Firefox. UGH!