About Me

nerd.of.steel: Rocco Augsuto

I am a Web Developer, Consultant, and former Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) based out of the City of Roses - Portland, Oregon. I have over 16 years of education and experience in the art of Web Design and Development and have no plans to stop my quest for knowledge anytime soon. Over the past couple years I have been moving into the mobile Internet space and started developing applications for the Google Android platform.

Apple's New Online Store - Complete With Bugs!

Posted: Sep 28, 10:48 AM

So I was doing my usually morning roundup of the latest and greatest web development news and saw that a few sites were touting Apple’s new Dojo enhanced online store. I decided to go and check in out and low and behold, the design was broken in Firefox.

Now sites get broken all the time and there are always little quirks here and there but for a company as large as Apple, this is unacceptable. It seems as though ever since the Internet hit that fabulous Web 2.0 stage, companies feel it is alright to deliver more “BETA” products instead of releasing more polished products. If I were to release a site such as this for one of my clients, I would probably not have a job the next day.

What makes this even more humorous was the fact that the site was optimized for Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Safari (duh!) and even Opera but Firefox was left out in the cold. You would think with the rise of Gecko based browsers on all operating systems, included Apple’s OS X, that they would have paid more attention to what they were doing!

Minus the slight layout issue, the rest of the site is actually really nice. Hopefully Apple will fix this problem soon as I am sure a lot of their customers use Mozilla’s Firefox.

Below is a screenshot of the issue as well as a link to the new Apple store. All in all, as I said above, the new store is pretty neat so check it out.

EDIT: Turns out I lied. The layout is broken in Internet Explorer 7 as well. At first I didn’t notice, but then how can you really miss huge gaps in Apple’s main navigation! Once again, I have no idea how large companies such as Apple would release such unpolished sites without testing! Stuff like this is just ridiculous. It looks as though Apple might need a new development team!

Mozilla Firefox

Apple Store Firefox Bug

Internet Explorer 7

Apple Store IE7 Bug

VISIT: The Apple Store (U.S.)

4 Responses to "Apple's New Online Store - Complete With Bugs!"

  1. jm said:

    Sep 28, 12:53 PM

    I see absolutely NO problems with the Mac Store site. I’m using FF 2.0.0.6

  2. Rocco said:

    Sep 28, 01:32 PM

    Hm, all of my development machines have already updated themselves to Firefox v2.0.07. It could be that this only effects the newer version of Firefox.

    If you do experience this error, a quick fix is to decrease the size on screen text via the “View > Text Size” option in Firefox.

    No matter what I have tried, IE7’s problem is still there.

  3. james said:

    Sep 28, 01:59 PM

    i see this on my windowz machine but not on my mac. seems to be an issue with how windowz renders text.

  4. Rocco said:

    Sep 28, 02:16 PM

    Thank you James. After reading your reply I decided to run back to the house real quick (i.e. across the street) to try loading the site on my Vista laptop and Linux Mint box. On both systems everything appeared to be alright.

    Figuring this was a Windows XP problem I went back and started fudging with the settings and enabled ClearType (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306527) which seemed to fix the problem on one of my XP boxes but the problem is still there on the other two boxes.

    This seems to be a Windows XP problem and it appears to be hit or miss. The odd thing is all of my dev systems were created identical in settings and software so I am not really sure what causes the problem.

    Hopefully this gets fixed soon as a large majority of Apple’s customers are actually Windows users (iPod and iTunes).

    Once again, thank you everyone for the feedback.