To be filed under WTF?!?! I was doing a little research for a post I’m writing on the BlackBerry Storm and I just had to call out BlackBerry for being complete Knobs and still requiring a user to access any of their pages with IE 5.5 or better. As a web developer, this really pisses me off that a major website still refuses to use accepted standards and produce accessible compliant web pages. But as a BlackBerry user it just makes me want to go and buy an iPhone!
Comments
5 responses to “BlackBerry: Get with the program it’s 2009”
Fact is even Google validates against IE before they check Chrome!!! I’ve had Google stuff render perfectly (well, relatively speaking) in IE and similarly in Firefox but completely choke-up Chrome!!!
And what it comes down to is the definition of “standard” because W3C isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s still some gaps in (X)HTML and CSS standards that are left up to the implementation to sort out. In that case might-makes-right and IE’s way of doing things becomes standard.
I like the CCRA’s approach – if they detect you’re not using IE they warn you: continue at your own risk.
You know, September 2nd is just a few months away and suddenly the GSM HSDPA Bellus network will be switched on and you could use that little iPhone on the Hell network just fine.
Did i mention that i MIGHT be tempted to upgrade my UNLOCKED iPhone 3G once the new one comes out 😉
Adi
Adi: LOL I might have to test drive a Pre first just to be sure, but I will my options open.
Shultzter: The problem is not validating the browser for better rendering, heck nay developer should do that anyway. The big issue is using IE dependent Active X controls to simply launch the BlackBerry Desktop Manager. This kind of behavior not only alienates your Windows users on Firefox or Chrome but openly tells any BlackBerry owner on a Mac or even a Linux distro that they are simply NOT welcome. This ridiculous attitude has no place in a mobility market where the newest and biggest rising star already has a desktop manager on both Windows and Mac.
I can’t speak for Linux, cause the only distro I have run in the last 6 month is DSL for about 30 minutes while I remembered that a PII notebook with 256MB of RAM is not going to make for a cool web surfing experience.
The fly in the ointment is that IE 8 actually follows standards, and the list of IE 7 compliant sites that it will break is tremendous. They had to build in a “render in IE 7” button in order to preventit from breaking the interwebs.
You could do what Google does – create a custom MIME type that points to your application. That’s how they get the “Launch Picasa” link to work, the URL is picasa://uploadtogoogle/ and they’ve registered a MIME type to handle the “picasa” protocol when you installed Picasa.
I’m not sure that’s a great solution either though.
But I don’t know what RIM was trying to accomplish on the page you’re referring to. I believe the Bb Desktop only exists for Windows so this isn’t a horrible solution if that’s all there is to it.