I’ve been getting a lot of Google Alerts about Microsoft’s new Zune media player recently. First it was an iPod killer, then it wasn’t, then it was coming soon and finally it arrived. I’m sure you’ve read it all elsewhere, so I’m not going to comment anymore on the device.
Instead, I am puzzled by the website that accompanies the device and will act as the marketplace for buying or subscribing to media. A few weeks back that was announced too, but rendered really badly on my laptop. I assumed this was a temporary thing, but it appears that was not the case. The device is on sale, the site one assumes is live, and yet I still see a page that looks like it was put together by a novice just learning HTML. I’ve seen MySpace pages that look better than this (actually, most MySpace pages look better than this).
I assume that nobody at MS uses anything other than IE. Some of us out here in the real world do use other browsers though, and as somebody that creates web content I know enough to at least check that it renders roughly how I want it to in the top 4 or 5 browsers. The problem seems to be that they totally omitted the CSS that would make the page look right. There is no style sheet information embedded in the page, nor linked to it.
it looks like you somehow defaulted to view|page style|no style ’cause that page does have style (it’s hideous but that’s aesthetics and not incompetence – well, a different kind of incompetence). firebug says it’s “” but you really don’t want to go there. looks like micro$lop eats their own dogfood ’cause the page looks like it was converted from m$word. disgusting!
and we’ll ignore all the oversexed teenagers that are being abused to attract the pu set …
darn! wordpress converted the micro$lop style link to real(tm) html … wonder what that will do to your site …
My guess is that they are doing either browser or OS tests and delivering the HTML headers based on that info, and my Linux/Firefox combination is probably one that they don’t know about (or at least didn’t think about). I haven’t tried it on the Mac – perhaps I’ll try that tonight.
you’re right that they’re browser sniffing, but it’s fairly safe dom layer interrogation. they detect mac/firefox and win/firefox correctly. regardless, it’s a buttugly site. dunno what sorta smegheads they wish to attract, but it’s one of the more repulsive sites i’ve visited. they deserve the users they attract.
and their little box is as revolting …
It must be a Linux thing since I tried it just now on my Linux/Firefox and like you said, it sucketh mightily, however whenever I’d looked at it on my Windows/Firefox combo it looked fine.
What is more interesting is that M$oft obviously didn’t get a hold of zune.com
Even more interesting is that they completely ditched the whole Plays 4 Sure thing which they spent so much time marketing and selling to a bunch of suckers like Napster, Rhapsody et al. Boy did they ever get Micro$hafted !!