Thursday 30 June 2005

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Access Job Centre Plus vacancies with Firefox

When it's your responsibility to keep your nearest and dearest's computers free from spyware and other minacious garbage, getting them to ditch Internet Explorer should be your number one priority. This is easier said than done if one of the sites they visit most frequently happens to be the official, UK job centre home page - because the search engine only works with Internet Explorer. I wouldn't let it needle me so much if the site was spectacularly difficult to rework to make it standards compliant, but we're only talking about a series of poxy text selection boxes!

To keep him safe from internet nasties I tell my dad - who is a total computer novice - that he should use Firefox for day to day browsing, and only revert to IE when viewing sites designed by lazy, stuck-in-the-past Microsoft puppets. This will remain good advice until Firefox and other alternative browsers eclipse IE's share of the market.

For now Worktrain makes my life a bit easier at least as it taps into the Job Centre Plus database without forcing users to navigate through the defective main site.

He has yet to come across another site he visits regularly which doesn't get on with Firefox. This is great news all round because he is gradually forgetting that IE exists at all, and I'm finding that the time it takes for me to cleanse his PC has plummeted.

I make no apologies for being a browser Nazi.

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