I have fought through adversity on many occasions, but it dawned on me very recently: Tesco’s website only works well in Internet Explorer.

I thought we were passed all that rubbish about cross-browser compatibility, but I was obviously wrong. Back in my student days I had a rant about Odeon.com not working with anything other than IE (not that they would reply to my emails). They had some fancy DHTML and flash which just broke if you viewed it in Opera or Netscape.

Obviously, there is some mischief afoot as I have wasted hours trying to wait for Tesco.com to resolve in Firefox. The worst example was last Christmas – I was up till 2am trying to amend my delivery and it took literally an hour and a half. I thought it could just be more imbeciles like me desperate to get their shopping, but this has always been the case since I started shopping online with Tesco.

It just shows the shortsightedness of whoever they have working on their website. It is built in ASP, but I have been to many a Microsoft impregnated website in another browser with no anguish (Microsoft.com for one!). Even though they state:

“To use Tesco.com, you will need one of the following browser versions or
higher:
. Microsoft Internet Explore 6.0
. Netscape 7.0
. Opera 8.5
. AOL 9.0
. Firefox 1.5
You will also need your browser to be enabled to use both JavaScript and
cookies.
All our web pages are designed with an 800×600 screen resolution in mind.”

Is it really that compliant? I don’t think it is, certainly with Firefox 2 or 3 which I have had problems with. Anyone else having Tesco/Firefox woe? C’est la vie.