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Sunday October 29, 2006
You must use Internet Explorer to live in Miami-Dade
Excellent work, guys, really. This is the page from which I got there, by clicking the “Find a park near you” link. Three observations here:
- A different level of government once sued Microsoft for monopolistic practices, remember? Here’s our county government doing its part to extend that monopoly.
- The error message is an absurdity at best, a lie at worst. It should say “This website is broken,” or “Sorry, this website doesn’t work with standards-compliant browsers,” or something.
- 99% of the people who make websites bust their asses to make their sites cross-compatible (it’s a pain mainly because of Microsoft’s malice and incompetence, btw). The fact that the government of our county — the 8th most populous in the nation — can’t be bothered is disgusting.
Overall, my impression is that miamidade.gov is a very information-rich site, but with lots of baffling gaps. Check out how the parks listed on pages like this don’t link to the parks’ pages. C’mon, guys; you can do better. Update: Dugg.
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if you think about it, around 90% of browsers used are IE, so it does kind of make sense.
that said, I’m not sure why anyone would use IE over firefox… other than for viewing non-firefox compatible webpages.
I can’t even remember the last time I used IE.
When You need a microsoft update…
The Miami-Dade website is indeed lame. For it and similar dysfunctional sites I keep the latest version of IE, with lowest-security default settings enabled, on my computer. But not even an upgrade to multi-browser standards would fix the poor design here. Have you tried navigating via the menus? There are actually pages that you cannot reach. I found this out when I tried to pay a bill by going to the pertinent department’s home page. I couldn’t find the payment page. I succeeded only by manually entering the URL from the back of the billing envelope. A city government site that actually discourages revenue collection — amazing. The whole M-D site has a slapped-together feel to it.
BTW, for great entertainment visit the code enforcement pages and search for “chicken busters.”
My favorite is the link to complaints/suggestions on the Transit page:
http://www.miamidade.gov/transit/complaint.asp
The more awesome part is that I got that same error page even though I was using ie7!
I use emaps all the time with Firefox and it works fine… but in general the whole site is a poorly designed mess
http://gisims2.miamidade.gov/emaps