The good news: If you've survived Hurricane Katrina, the government will let you register for help online. The bad news: But only if the computer you're using is running Windows. Yes, it turns out that to make a claim with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Individual Assistance Center, your Web browser must be Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 or higher and you must have JavaScript enabled. It even says so right on the page itself. One problem: IE6 isn't available for Macintosh or Linux computers. Complaints about government Web sites requiring Microsoft software aren't new, of course. (MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.) But this is one instance that struck particularly hard for some. Mac user Gary Mullins wrote Monday on the MacInTouch Web site: "My 90-year old mother sat out Katrina in her brother’s home next door in Diamondhead, MS, about eight miles from the Mississippi coast where the hurricane’s eye hit. They survived without injury but with massive destruction to their homes, and my mother has lost most of her possessions. I brought her to my home in California yesterday and this morning went to the FEMA website to register to start the assistance process. To my dismay, our Federal emergency agency requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, and only IE 6, to use the website for disaster assistance. I don’t want to be political about this, but this smacks of a serious leadership failure that the use of the Internet is reserved for only the Windows community.” Read the rest of the article at MSNBC
Have to really feel bad for people in this situation especially since most users that are stuck in this situation probably don't know how to be able to change the user agent string to read IE6 and I'm sure the last thing on their mind is trying to find a browser running IE when their lives have pretty much been destroyed.
Agreed. OS zealotry aside, there is no good reason to code a webpage IE only, especially one of this nature. It seems like the US government (namely FEMA) has been grossly incompetent to the point of outright negligence in nearly every respect during this crisis. They've turned away food, supplies, help, support, and now this. What a beurocratic nightmare at its worst -- we really need some governmental reform in this country! -AT
