Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Sena Cases: Quality PDA Cases, Terrible Site

My beautiful Toshiba e800 is currently case-less (not counting my home-made version, a snap-lock sandwich bag inside a hard, velvet-lined jewellery box, a perfect fit in fact, however, it renders my gadget completely useless whilst imprisoned in there) so I've been researching options for a new pocket jacket for a little while now.

In my sporadic searches I keep finding myself at the Sena Cases web site, whose front page is the only one on the site that works in Firefox. (Well, apart from the Flash ad at the top, which also fails.)

Why? Check this out for a URL:
http://www.senacases.com/cart/home.php?cat=290&
send_isJS=Y&send_browser=YNN|Mozilla|5|Win32|N|
1024|768|Mozilla+Default%20Plug-in|RealJukebox+NS
%20Plugin|RealPlayer(tm)+G2%20LiveConnect-Enabled
%20Plug-In%20(32-bit)%20|RealPlayer+Version%20Plugin
|MetaStream+3%20Plugin|Adobe+Acrobat|QuickTime+
Plug-in%206.0.2|QuickTime+Plug-in%206.0.2|QuickTime
+Plug-in%206.0.2|QuickTime+Plug-in%206.0.2|Windows+
Media%20Player%20Plug-in%20Dynamic%20Link%20
Library|Microsoft%AE+DRM|Microsoft%AE+DRM|
Shockwave+Flash|Adobe+Acrobat
Nasty stuff. Returns a rare 414 Request Failed: URI too long error, in fact. Seems they're attempting to parse details about my installed plugins, but something is going very awry on the backend, resulting in URL-pie. (No, not PIE, pie.)

The part I find most amusing, however, (or, depending on my mood, annoying) is that I keep forgetting the name of this poorly-developed site's company, so quickly is it that I shut the tab when I realise ["Damn! This site again!"] that it ain't gonna load. Can't decide if it's bad marketing on their behalf that it hasn't sunk in yet, or just my mind blocking them out due to their non-support of my favourite browser. I'm suspecting the latter, but really, that boils down to nothing more than bad marketing too.

And, no. No way will I open up IE just to use their web site. How can I trust a company whose products target predominantly tech-minded people, when they shut the door to (arguably) the most tech-minded users with their web site? And why would I want to?

(You may be surprised to learn that in person, I hardly ever talk about Firefox, and I definitely don't wangle the topic into completely unrelated conversations whenever I can. Usually.)

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