{"id":186,"date":"2009-07-28T10:24:40","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T15:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/?p=186"},"modified":"2009-07-28T10:30:56","modified_gmt":"2009-07-28T15:30:56","slug":"t-mobile-website-unfriendly-to-chrome-safari","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/2009\/07\/t-mobile-website-unfriendly-to-chrome-safari\/","title":{"rendered":"T-Mobile Website Unfriendly to Chrome, Safari"},"content":{"rendered":"

Early this morning, Nicola was bugging me to add a data plan to her phone account in anticipation of receiving her shiny new MyTouch<\/a>. We logged on to the site using our favored browser, Google’s Chrome<\/a>. Here’s what we found:<\/p>\n

\"T-Mobile\\'s
T-Mobile's default page in Chrome, post login<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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’.”<\/p>\n

That’s when it hit me. I should try a different browser.
\n
\nThe same page in Firefox:<\/p>\n

\"T-Mobile's
T-Mobile's default page in Firefox, post login<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(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.)<\/p>\n

The same issue affects Safari, the default browser on the Mac. According to one browser statistics report<\/a>, 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).<\/p>\n

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

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

\"T-Mobile's
T-Mobile's site with Javascript disabled<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

The site, which relies heavily on Javascript and AJAX, becomes completely unusable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visitors to T-Mobile’s site using Safari or Chrome lose dramatic amounts of functionality, leading to customer frustration and unnecessary calls to customer support. Verdict? Cross-browser compatibility saves money and improves customer satisfaction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[80,81,47,78,76,77,79],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-practices","tag-accessibilty","tag-ajax","tag-chrome","tag-cross-browser-compatibilty","tag-safari","tag-tmobile","tag-usability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":196,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}