I was doing a review of legal Australian music download services tonight, and somehow landed on the Optus Zoo Mobile Music page. Apparently Optus and MTV signed a deal a while back allowing Optus to distribute MTV music to their mobile subscribers.
So I clicked through to the music store and I’m greeted by the following page:
Curious as to what I would possibly have to do to make Firefox work (after all, it is one of the most standards compliant browsers on the planet) I followed the link… and to my disbelief I was told I had to install the “IE Tab” Firefox extension to make the site “work in Firefox”. (This extension essentially allows you to embed an IE instance right inside Firefox). Don’t believe me? If you’re using Firefox or Safari, go and have a look at it for yourself.
Now I don’t know who their web developers are, but they should fire them immediately and hire some that know what they’re doing. This is NOT Firefox compatibility! This is lazy, sloppy, amateur software development, pure and simple, and I’m amazed (and frustrated) that there are big companies still producing shonky stuff like this.
There is simply no excuse for only supporting IE these days. Non-IE browsers account for over 20% of the market, and if you can’t support them, you don’t deserve their business.
I sent them some feedback to this effect… I’m not expecting a response. 
Update: I found an associated site which explains a little further:
The content owners from whom we obtain our music and videos require that we use digital rights management (DRM), therefore our database and system run on Windows Media DRM.
Using this technology, delivery of the license and content of the music files are combined and delivered to your PC at once.
This DRM technology works only with Internet Explorer 6.0 and above, and Mozilla Firefox (with IE Tab installed). Other browsers are unfortunately incompatible.
So I guess I’ll forgive the developers… and blame Microsoft instead (after all, everybody loves to hate Microsoft)! Actually no, I’ll blame the record labels - just another example of the ridiculous lengths that they go to to prevent people from buying their products.
