Wake Up SABC
by Gavin Dale
On Sunday SABC 2's Weekend Live show was giving away 10 copies of a book on copyright protection called "From Edison to the iPod". To get a copy all you needed to do was fax them or visit the SABC website. Yeah freebies! Needless to say I went to sabc.co.za right away (who faxes nowadays anyways?).
And that is where the fun began…
sabc.co.za breaks apart in Firefox. Damn – I couldn’t believe it but I really wanted that book, so after clicking around aimlessly on their corporate site I went to trusty Google and discovered that each SABC channel has its own separate website.
Great. So I select sabc2.co.za and surprise surprise it also breaks in Firefox. I couldn’t access the dropdowns as they dropdown on the other side of the screen - very challenging (read irritating) so I tried searching for the competition - nothing. So either the competition is not there (most likely) or it is damn near impossible to access.
I tried again on Monday morning (mmmm "blog research" J9) and wouldn’t you know I couldn’t get my free book!
But of course the more important thing is that the SABC sites have not been designed for Firefox (and probably every other browser besides Internet Explorer - I was so annoyed I didn't bother checking).
Ultimately they are excluding a lot of people - latest stats from w3schools put Firefox at 34% of market share. Another interesting point I found in this article on MyBroadband is that the South African Government seems to be punting Firefox.
And the national broadcaster has sites that don't work in Firefox – Go figure!
Scarier still is that the SABC places great emphasis on education and not everyone can access their site.
Comments
post a commentja I have a mac so I can't run ie. I don't think the competition was up on their site anyway. just all round ineptitude on sabc's part. although has anyone noticed the quality of movies they have been showing lately - the believer, the anniversary party, donnie darko this monday - late at night for me but well done!
Posted by gavin on 2007/07/27
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Gavin, chances are that SABC2 does not even know what Firefox is. Or they would expect their development company to do their job properly. I sure would. There are many possibilities but my first reaction would be to corner my web developers. I can't understand who in their right mind excludes Firefox from their builds.
Then also Gavin, you wanted the book pretty badly. The least effort was to just use IE. It seems you dislike it so much you wouldn't use if your life depended on it? ;-)
Posted by Henre on 2007/07/26