Browser detection still sucky

Well, just after being surprised by some Browser detection preventing me using a travel insurance site with Firefox, I stumbled across another example in the same week. I’ve just upgraded to Firefox 3; I know I’m a bit slow off the mark here, but unlike many who work in IT, I don’t usually classify as an early adopter. Anyway it seems pretty good, and faster than Firefox 2.

Went to access the Traveline Scotland Journey Planner, which is an indispensable but imperfect tool for finding bus and train times. Greeted with this strange warning:

I could just downgrade to Firefox 1.5 (superseded by 1.6 in February 2004) or Internet Explorer 6 (superseded by IE 7 in October 2006). Or maybe Traveline Scotland could just review their browser support.

Browser detection sucks

Not seen one of these for a while:

I was looking online for travel insurance, and at one point looked at allcleartravel.co.uk. Except their site didn’t like the fact I was using Firefox. Installed Chris Pederick’s User Agent Switcher Firefox extension to get around it and see why/how they were doing this. (Incidentally, did you know Chris Pederick also wrote the invaluable Web Developer extension? If you do any web development work at all, it’s essential). Here’s the simple bit of script they’re using to get rid of 20% or so of their potential customers.

<!-- FF detection script -->

if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Firefox") != -1)
{
   window.location = "http://www.allcleartravel.co.uk/images/alc/alc_firefox.html";
}

Their site certainly uses a lot of Javascript but I couldn’t see anything that would obviously give Firefox a problem. Although when clicking the ‘Get a Quote’ button, it takes forever and then ends up redirecting to a blank screen at https://www.allcleartravel.co.uk.