Published 2007-05-06 10:25:00

When you spend a large proportion of your day working on internet applications, and a considerable amount of that time working around annoying browser bugs (IE and Safari win here). You do it out a sense of pride, that you are delivering the best possible product. Solving these problems is a mater of personal pride that I produced the best possible end user experience.

So when I see site that is not only mindbogglingly broken, but has been developed by large corporations with relatively unlimited budgets (well compared to most of mine anyway). It just really makes me wonder how such under qualified moron's managed to get such high paying jobs......

Here's my list of shame.

1. HSBC a) for taking years to realize that intra bank transfers where a phisher's dream, b) waiting until the government mandated two tier authentication and finally when they deploy it. Being so broken that it takes over 5 minutes to get through the authentication system. What is even worse, is the lack of acknowledgment that they have a problem.

2. EsdLife, our governments outsourced 'e' website. Run by a company owned by the largest tycoon in Hong Kong. Which initially only supported IE on Windows, (allegedly), and for what must be now, 5 years, Has never worked once for me. not even for simple things like setting up a e-password to file tax returns or booking tickets for tennis courts.

3. Verified by Visa, or better know as unverified by JavaScript errors. This site not only has numerous JavaScript bugs, but does not correctly identify mozilla compatible browsers. No you should not use the browser name for compatibility testing.

All of these have one thing in common. Huge amounts of money spend on a web site, by a large organization. Which needs only to do a relatively simple task (read "It's just HTML stupid"). Yet manages to complicate it to the point that it makes the sites almost completely useless...

Know of any other great examples. It's just a shame we cant name the project manager's names and shame them into fixing these problems.
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Comments

crap HK websites
HSBC actually fixed their website in response to my complaining that it takes forever to load a page under Linux. Try it!

Of course, the government website would work if you could provide the winning combination of browser and Java identifications, but I have yet to figure out what they are looking for. Seems they are actively blocking who don't buy the products they support.
#0 - Stacey ( Link) on 2007-05-17 20:55:07 Delete Comment

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