So I thought it would be cool to purchase a Parks Canada Discovery Pass. The fee is actually quite reasonable and with my proximity to Banff, I would probably use it. So I go to the Parks Canada web site (http://www.parkscanada.ca/) and discover you can purchase passes online. This seemed like a reasonable idea so I navigated to the shopping area. What happened after is inexcusable.
First, I am greeted by a box that says, “The browser you are using is not supported. For full functionality, please use Internet Explorer 7 and later or Firefox 3.5 and later for Windows. For Mac systems please use Safari 4 and later, or Firefox 3.5 and later.” Okay, I figure they just didn’t bother testing anything other than Windows and Mac (I use Linux) and I’m using Firefox 3.6 so I should be okay, right? Wrong!
Everything works on the pass selection screen. Then I click “Add to cart” and I’m magically teleported to a page which lists my shopping cart, as expected. What is not expected is that the cart was empty. That’s right, empty, even though I had just added something to it.
Now what the blazes could they possibly be doing that prevents the “Add to cart” button from working? If thousands of other sites can make a shopping cart the works fine across reasonable browsers and operating systems, why can’t Parks Canada? Well, I don’t have access to Windows or Mac to find out. But come on, why should something as simple as a shopping cart be platform dependent? I can see requiring a modern browser, but platform sniffing is passé, and stupid even.
So, Parks Canada and anyone else with a shopping cart: Get with the program! There is no excuse for platform dependencies in an e-commerce site of any kind!
I just checked in at Parks Canada again with an eye to purchasing a park pass. This time, I was using Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 11.04. Either they updated something in the mean time (which it looks like they might have – the screens looked a bit different) or whatever features they were relying on are present in Firefox 4.