John Gruber of Daring Fireball links to a grotto11 blog post about how the new Zune.net (MS doesn’t have rights to Zune.com) website uses a craptacular browser-detector to serve up its CSS stylesheet. That’s lame, because that means certain browsers are on the website’s “OK” list, and others aren’t. If you use a relatively standard browser, here’s how the Zune.net homepage looks:
Not horrible, but for the life of me, I can’t get my head around brown. I just can’t. Maybe this makes me a bad person, I don’t know. It’s like Quake 2 came out of retirement and started designing websites. But regardless of what I think, overall this is a relatively attractive and modern-looking page.
Now, go to Zune.net with another browser, something non-standard. grotto11 suggests Camino. This is what you get:
This is a little something we call terrible. Not using CSS has a way of bringing back 1994 all over again, minus Boyz II Men and Probe GTs.
What a completely stupid design on behalf of Microsoft. They still can’t design a website properly.
Also, as a bonus thought, which website you do simply think looks better — iPod’s or Zune’s?
Deathmatch:
vs. 
I vote iPod, just because it’s so well-lit, attractive, and straightforward. It presents to you the product options, the software component of the device, special edition products, featured downloads, and holiday offers. Zune’s is just a hipster mish-mash of stock photography, funky feature icons, and a brief whisper about its software. Oh, there’s brown. Lots and lots of brown.
And for the finishing move, the iPod site works in Camino, as obscure and non-standard as it is:
Imagine that.
Technorati Tags: Apple & OSX, iPod, Zune
14 responses so far ↓
John Gruber // December 2, 2006 at 4:12 pm
The thing that’s so maddening about it is that even though Camino isn’t particularly *mainstream*, it is in fact utterly *standard*. Camino offers almost identical support for web standards (HTML and CSS) as Firefox 1.5.
If Microsoft had done no browser sniffing at all, Zune.net would render perfectly in Camino.
Jeff Ventura // December 2, 2006 at 4:35 pm
John — I wondered about why Firefox 2 (my browser of choice) and FF 1.5 worked fine on Zune.net, but Camino crapped out. I didn’t think it was anything to do with the rendering engine, as they’re largely the same insofar as HTML and CSS go.
I’m not familiar enough with the potential reasons why MS chose to sniff the browser type (laziness?), but I agree with what you and Brian Tiemann say about it being just a plain stupid design decision.
Plus I don’t really grok Zune.net’s design aesthetic, if you couldn’t tell.
Jay // December 2, 2006 at 5:17 pm
you really think if your so dumb as to buy a zune you are smart enough to use a browser other than the one M$ gave you when you bought the computer?
Dean Walford // December 2, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Coming to the social?
A networked table for a party of one Zune, come to dine on a large serving of Plutonium 210?
Just another Microsoft wannabe me-too obsolete place filler product until they can buy something useful and perhaps competitive, cause they certainly can’t innovate or create anything people choose to buy, on their own.
michaelsanford // December 2, 2006 at 10:51 pm
Why, I wonder, would anyone think this is a good idea…
Jeff Ventura // December 2, 2006 at 10:57 pm
Michael — as John Gruber points out above, this isn’t an idea per se on Microsoft’s part, but rather a somewhat lazy oversight, because Zune.net doesn’t have to use browser-sniffing. At least that’s my best guess.
John // December 2, 2006 at 11:26 pm
I don’t know. I’m thinking maybe something is wrong with Camino.
I tried their site with iCab and OmniWeb and they’re both more obscure than Camino and they both worked well.
Maybe Camino is blocking some function in their overly abusive use of JavaScript in the page.
Jeff Ventura // December 2, 2006 at 11:31 pm
John — It’s because Zune.net has code in it that sniffs the browser type. If the type comes back as something known — if it passes the sniff — it gets CSS. If the sniff fails, it doesn’t.
Zune.net doesn’t have to do this, but it does. That’s the issue here. Unless someone is using a really old browser with lousy CSS handling, the problem shown in my post is because of Zune.net’s browser detection code.
Wayne // December 2, 2006 at 11:59 pm
hey. anyone notice that even Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac won’t render that site correctly!!!! hahahahah
Corn Bread // December 3, 2006 at 9:26 am
Regarding your comment on the use of brown, what color ismore fitting in the marketing of a piece of shit?
Jeff Ventura // December 3, 2006 at 10:20 am
Wayne — IE 5.2 is dead to me. It should be to any Mac user.
ebi // December 4, 2006 at 5:33 am
the same goes for the m$ live mail prev hotmail….it dsnt wrk well with firefox or opera.
Loren Helgeson // December 4, 2006 at 7:09 pm
Why bother using a browser sniff at all? I tried this on four other browsers (IE, Safari, Firefox and Opera), and they all work the same.
As an aside, from what I’ve seen, Camino is closer to Safari than Firefox as far as it’s rendering goes. It’s even provides that annoyance where when you try to refresh a page, the browser turns to the cached page instead. But, whatever.
It’s hard to believe that Microsoft is considered part of the W3C. They are the epitome of the violation of web standards.
Jeff Ventura // December 4, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Loren — exactly right. As John Gruber mentions above, if Zune.net *didn’t* sniff, the site would render just fine in Camino. There seems to be no reason to do a sniff, hence why I’m calling it a bad design decision.
As you know, Camino is the FF Gecko engine, just simplified and GUIified to be more Mac-like. What FF renders, so will Camino.
No idea what MS was thinking.