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Comment by nikron | Hacker News Reader

It says I can't see go to the webpage because I'm not using a supported browser. I'm using Firefox 3 on linux. However, I can see the webpage if javascript is off, but not much is there.

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I'm getting the same thing, which isn't surprising since I'm using Opera. In general, I think it's fine to say "browser not supported" if that's the case, but it's nice to have a "Try anyway" link. There are too many sites that work fine with a given browser but refuse the user a chance to try. If you give the user a choice, the worst case is that the site really is broken with their browser, and they say "Hmpf, guess they're right" and move on.

I suppose there's a potentially worse case where the site is broken in some subtle way that causes data corruption or the like, but I can't imagine there are many webapps where this is a serious concern.

Great suggestion. Thanks.

-Pete

I'm using FF2 and need to stay on it due to certain plugins that haven't made their way up to FF3 yet.

Not letting me even see the content of the site because of this is a sure fire way of losing me as a customer.

+1 FF3 on linux

We will enhance the site as we continue to move forward, thank you for pointing this out.

If you get errors reported like this to your customer support, try answering with a more personable response. The way you phrased this comes off as dismissive and doesn't specifically address the issue reported.

Would you have preferred "You use a niche browser on a niche operating system which our analytics indicates less than 1 out of 10,000 visitors use, accordingly, we're spending our engineering resources elsewhere and I would not expect resolution of this anytime soon. Toodles"?

Actually, yes. That's way more personable and less canned. I also said, "if you get emails like this" meaning similar in nature, not necessarily subject matter.

We're all geeks (and most of us are also programmers and webdevs) here.

Howabout a technical description of whats going on instead of a canned response?

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