Leave the Driving to Us
I just visited Progressive’s Drive Insurance web site to try to get auto insurance quotes. I can enter my zip code, and the fact that I’m looking for car insurance, but the party’s over when I click the button to request quotes:
Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with a quote online. We require that you have Internet Explorer version 6.0 or newer to get a quote online. Our systems indicate that your browser is an older version or does not otherwise meet this requirement. We apologize for the inconvenience.This isn’t a complete surprise, as I’m using Safari on Mac OS X. So I fired up Firefox instead.
No luck there, either — they really have hard-coded their site for IE. How ironic is it that a company named “Progressive” has such a late 1990′s approach to web site design? I honestly don’t remember the last web site I visited that just refused to work with non-IE browsers. I mean, even Microsoft’s own web sites don’t require IE.
Posted June 29th, 2006 in Miscellaneous.
Have you tried using the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox? It lets you change the User Agent string reported by the browser so that the site will think it’s IE. Chances are it will actually work fine once you fool the site into letting you in.
The above won’t work if they’re using capability sniffing rather than just reading the browser string. But I’ve never seen someone use capability sniffing for a decision as draconian as this; usually capability sniffing is only used to determine *how* to provide functionality cross-browser, not *when*.
Come to think of it, I think I remember someone mentioning that Safari also has this ability, and it’s built in rather than being a plugin. You might look into that, too.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:22 amYou’re probably correct that the site would work fine as long as I changed the User-Agent string. I think I’d rather just give my business to some other company that doesn’t make me jump through stupid hoops like this to use their service.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:29 am