Acts of Volition

I’ve long enjoyed the photos in the MSNBC feature, The Week in Pictures and The Week in Sports Pictures. However, during a recent redesign, the format and display of these features has gotten much worse.

Update: A reader has pointed out that though it is still Flash-based, the MSNBC Week in Pictures feature now works in Firefox. Thanks.

If I go to The Week in Pictures using Mozilla Firebird, my default browser, and a popular standards-compliant browser, I see an error graphic telling me “Sorry. Your browser is not compatible with this interactive feature.”

Well, it’s not that my browser isn’t compatible with their “interactive feature”, but rather that their “interactive feature“ isn’t compatible with standard web browsers.

The features do work in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. However, I suspect we would be giving them too much credit to assume that MSNBC intentionally cripples features in non-Microsoft web browsers. Rather, I suspect that this is a matter of bad web development. If I’m wrong, though, and it is intentionally, then the behaviour is abhorrent, and given their anti-trust history, I hope illegal.

The Week in Pictures feature is now displayed in Flash. Flash is great for some things — but this isn’t one of them. Thanks to their use of Flash, I can’t, for example link to the individual images. I can’t even link to the entire slideshow due to their sloppy overuse of JavaScript.

What bothers me most about this is that they aren’t using some wacky Microsoft-only technology to display the photos. Mozilla Firebird can handle Flash quite happily. If you view the source HTML code on the page with the error message, you’ll see the URL of the actual Flash file. If you open this URL directly in Firebird, you’ll see that the feature actually does work in Mozilla Firebird.

Interested geeks can take a look at the JavaScript code they are using to incorrectly determine which browsers can access their feature.

Shame on MSNBC — I’d like to view their fine feature content — but I can’t.