Error: You're browser does not support AJAX

The site is in error, not the browser.

All the browsers you mention support AJAX. If you're getting this message the chances are it's a bug in the JavaScript on the page that's misinterpreting the AJAX data, or a bug on the server that's not generating data in the way the JavaScript expects.

Either way there's nothing browser-side you can do to fix this. It's called browser compatibility testing and is up to the developer to do.

Try Opera.

If that doesn't work either, let the people responsible for your work program know that it has some problems that need to be fixed.

So basically you are saying that there is nothing I can do and my Mac will not be able to be used for my work program?

Not at all. I'm saying can't fix it yourself but that doesn't mean you can't do anything at all. You need to go back to the developer of the web application and tell them their program doesn't work and that they need to fix it.

IE for the Mac is WAY too old to work.

As mentioned by a previous poster, the error is a bad detection routine within the application, and not your browser.

If you want to try and FORCE it to work, try the following.

1) Enable the Developer tools in Safari by checking the 'Show Develop menu in menu bar' box at the bottom of the Advanced preferences tab in Safari.

2) Go to the Develop menu and select, 'User Agent -> Internet Explorer'. I'd start with IE8, try the site, then IE7, and IE6 if it doesn't work.

Depending on how the programmer is doing the check, it may or may not work around the error.

When a web browser connects to a web server, one of the headers that it communicates back to the server is its 'User-Agent'. That allows the server to change its behavior to better fit what's talking to it.

So if the User-Agent says it's an iPhone, it'll give you an iPhone tuned page.

By forcing Safari to announce itself as Internet Explorer, if the AJAX check is being done partly by that User-Agent header, it may pass and allow you to move along.

The reason why Opera works, but not perfectly, is that while the HTML markup language is a standard, each browser vendor interprets things differently. Some web developers take advantage of (or more likely, work around bugs with) those differences, especially for browsers like IE. So Opera is probably just mis-interpreting one of those modifications.

You very well may run into the same thing with Safari.

There are 4 really popular web engines.

WebKit : Used by Safari, Chrome, and some Linux browsers
Gecko: Used by Firefox
IE: Has a couple names for the engine as they've updated it recently.
Opera: Not sure on the name of their engine, but it's their own.

... so you could get a completely different rendering of the page (but hopefully not THAT different) with each of those engines.

If you say its a manufacturers error Camelot, than why is it slowly getting better with different browsers?

In short, because the software developer is an idiot.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it's the case.

Any web developer (at least those that are worth anything) knows that there are differences between each browser's interpretation of HTML code, JavaScript and, especially, CSS. Because of these differences you cannot guarantee that a web page will look the same across all browsers. Sometimes the differences are minor (a line offset by a pixel or two, or text displaying in the wrong color) but sometimes the differences severely impact performance. That happens most often when the developer has a blinkered-eye view of the world, typically working with IE on Windows (which is known to be the quirkiest of browsers, although IE8 does a better job than IE7 or (ick) IE6). He might even have written VisualBasic code on the page which is guaranteed to not work on any non-Windows platform.

The solution to this quandary has not yet been found. The best that anyone can do is test their code on different browsers. From the sounds of it, your developer only tested against IE, it seemed to work so he said he was done. If he'd tested in FireFox he would have seen the problem and could have fixed it, and the chances are that fix would have worked for other browsers, too.

So, why doesn't it work? because the developer didn't write it to work in multiple browsers. 🙂

VMWare or Parallels is the most stable if you have a spare copy of XP, Vista, or Windows 7 laying around and 2+ GB of memory. If you only need it for IE, you can run it in a mode that doesn't force you to look at the full windows desktop all day - but you're basically just running Windows on your mac.

Crossover for Mac can run IE6 ( http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac). A free equivalent (same technology) can be found within WineBottler ( http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/).

If you don't mind rebooting back into Windows, you could also just install Windows on your Mac using Bootcamp. Careful though, with Windows 7, you might be tempted to switch back. 🙂

I think crossover mac will run IE 6 and 7. Of course whether it will do the necessary with your site can only be determined by testing.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/

I just tried wine bottler and it crashed installing IE 7 and 8 and was unstable on IE 6.

Crossover might be better, but I wouldn't put down money without testing the demo version for a while.

Bootcamp, Parallels, or VMWare would be fine.