Don’t Detect Visitor OS
The beauty of the web is its cross-compatible, OS-independant nature. Or so it should be! Today I tried to view a video on the MTV site and was greeted with the following:
Detecting OS…
PC Users with Windows 95 or 98: you need to run Windows 2000 or Windows XP to use MTV Overdrive.
Um, hello! I’m running Windows XP 64-bit edition! The occassional program doesn’t want to run on x64 because someone’s OS detection code sucks - that’s almost understandable.. but to have a web site reject you when you clearly do have the required specs is sh*t! I can only imagine what Mac users go through…
The moral: Don’t lock out visitors to your web site based on their OS. If your web app doesn’t work on all PC platforms (mobile devices are a different story) then fix it or use a different technology!