Can't fill certain forms using Firefox

[Tearose]

Before ordering a computer from HP, the shopping cart page has a button to click on to estimate tax and shipping. Clicking on it opens a pop-up window with a form to enter zip code and state. This form is run by a company called liveperson, and when I fill it in from the Firefox browser, and submit, it shows up again as if I hadn't filled it in. I don't know what programming language liveperson uses for this form, so I don't know how to find out if Firefox has a plug-in for it. Does anyone know? It's annoying to have to restart the process in IE, which has no problem with this form.

 

[tviman]

You'll find that some web sites only respond (or partially respond) when using IE. This is because the person(s) who wrote the web site used certain scripting tags and/or languages that only work with IE. This is, and has been, a real problem for web designers and is known as "cross-browser compatibility".

IE (a Microsoft product) seems to allow some very poor programming practices as far as HTML and Javascript are concerned. The pop-up you mentioned is, in all likelyhood, written with Javascript and IE does a poor job of implementing Javascript standards.

The fix? There is none, yet. All browser manufactures will have to come together and decide to use the published programming standards uniformly before this problem goes away. In the meantime we're all in the same boat you're in by having to use IE now and then.

There's always a better way. The fun is trying to find it!

 

[MikeT]

and be sure to tell HP about your poor experience on their site, and that you'll likely order from somewhere else next time. They won't change anything if they don't know it's wrong!

 

[Tearose]

The new version of Firefox I downloaded last week has an extension in tools to view a page in IE. That solves the problem, and the annoyance of having to go back and forth between browsers. I checked it with this particular page and it works. I haven't tried it on a Microsoft site yet,