There’s now an outcry of Linux users claiming that “NY Times discriminates against Linux users“. And it’s true, just go to nytimes.com and try to access their video section. You’ll get an annoying messages claiming that “To view New York Times Video, you must have browser Cookies enabled, Macromedia Flash Player, and a supported Browser/Operating System/Media Player configuration.” Clicking the “click here” link on that page reveals that they want you to use Microsoft Windows XP or Apple Mac OS X. The workaround? Just install the User Agent Switcher plugin for your Firefox and you can pretend to be using Windows XP. Now you can view any video from nytimes.com.
This problem is just due to bad web programming from nytimes.com. It should be enough to just check if the visitor is using Macromedia Flash, because that’s apparently all you need to view the videos. It seems that a lot of sites are still making ridiculous demands from their users. “This site is best viewed with IE 4.0″ is a message that you’ll still today see on a lot of websites. Perhaps some companies add a fancy piece of script to detect the browser just for he hell of it, because it’s a common web cliche they’ve seen on so many other sites. But to tell the visitors that they have to install Windows XP in order to view a simple web page is just plain silly. Please everybody – just make standards compliant web pages. Now if the visitor’s browser isn’t standards compliant it’s the visitor’s fault they can’t view the site.
This may not be the worst case of discrimination in the world, but it is extremely annoying. So just give angry feedback whenever you come across sites that don’t like Linux users. It might not change a damn thing, but at least it’ll make you feel better.
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