Websites that require IE to open

Use the Develop menu to choose IE 6 or IE7 as the User Agent. If the Develop menu is not already enabled, go to Preferences > Advanced and check the box at the bottom of that window to turn it on.

Mulder

kinxuzumaki wrote:
I tried this and it was an improvement,a confused looking version the website will now flash briefly on the page before going white. It is an improvement from nothing but still not perfect (cant login or use the web app).

This indicates that the web site in question was designed only for Internet Explorer without bothering to test it in other web browsers. It's bad web design practice, but there's not much you can do under those circumstances, other than politely emailing the webmasters of the site to request that they follow good web design practices and design the site to work in other commonly used, modern web browsers.

Another thought is that its a secure site for an insurance company, is there any type of IE security measure that may exist that i don't know about that may be causing this to not run in Safari or Firefox?

Safari and Firefox have high security capability, so it's not that they can't comply with the security needs of a site that stores sensitive information. But in the interests of expediency some programmers of such sites will only test the security features in one or a very few web browsers and then manually lock out other, untested browsers. Under those circumstances it's probably best to avoid using the browsers that they haven't tested and aren't supporting. But again, a polite email to the web site administrators asking that secure browsers like Safari and Firefox be used when testing their site and included in their supported browsers is not a bad idea.

That page (and probably the rest of the site) have been coded for IE only. Not only that, but that page specifically has at least 12 errors in the basic HTML code that make it fail on any standards-compliant browser, of which IE isn't. They also have an invalid security certificate.

The only thing you can do is install Windoze on your Mac, or just use a Windoze machine at work to access that site.

Mulder

kinxuzumaki wrote:
I sent an email to the webmaster, I guess the only thing I can do now is wait and hope. However, the website is very poorly designed & buggy even in its native IE. I have little faith that the web dev team will will put additional effort to enable quality modern browsers. So i guess im stuck doing this work in the office because I'd really rather not install Windows on my Mac at home, haha.

Sounds like a good plan all around. 🙂

One thing that might be reassuring ... When a web site is that clunky in design and programming, there's actually a good chance that sometime, maybe even soon, they'll do a revamp, and if they're really trying at all, they very well might make it standards-compliant and functional in both Windows and Mac web browsers. It's actually more common these days and close to being a trend, so here's hoping.