Launch.com won’t.
Surfing around while trying to find something else to look at besides hurricane Isabel coverage, I came upon a link to view a new Dave Matthews video on Launch.com. I click said link, get get this:
Now, there are all kinds of things that are striking about this “ERROR!” message. As you can see from my browser interface, I am using Safari, not any flavor of Netscape. But let’s excuse this, since Safari does identify itself with as a Gecko browser.
The beauty is that I get this error even when I set Safari to report that I am using MSIE version 6. Now, I can’t test this right now, but I am certain that if I was using the most popular (by default) browser in the world, this video would launch properly. There’s no way Launch.com could survive if IE 6 users couldn’t see their stuff.
I have no real conclusion here. This is just another fine example of bad web development or design or whatever bucket you want to put this into. It’s just bad, ok? It’s a simple example of yet another awful browser-detection script gone awry.
Why do I need Launch.com to protect me from myself. Can’t I at least try to get it to work? At the very least, a link to continue regardless of the error should have been included.
Silly Launch.com, browser detection tricks are for kids.
Update: The reason switching the User Agent Safari reports doesn’t work is because the link pops up a new window, which defaults to reporting itself as Safari again.
This doesn’t excuse the behavior of this site. Just offers a bit more explanation.
