By Dave Zatz
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
As we originally reported, Gap brand web sites shut down for a redesign. We stand by what we said then, “Rule one in the world of online: you do not go dark ever. As in never.” However, it seems like we’re going to have to come up with additional rules – some sort of remedial e-commerce guidance for the Gap folks. As it turns out, their “more compelling and exciting” site is a downgrade for Mac Safari users who can no longer place online orders. While we recognize only a small percentage of users are impacted, we don’t understand the logic of removing functionality, alienating customers, and reducing potential sales.
Gap Inc., one of the world’s largest specialty clothing retailers, has made changes to several of its websites that prevent users of Apple’s Mac OS X Safari Web browser from browsing and shopping its brands.
This week Safari users began reporting problems when attempting to visit the websites of Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy — three trendy brands owned by San Francisco, Calif.-based Gap Inc.
“It looks like the new gap.com, bananarepublic.com and oldnavy.com do not support the latest version of Safari,” said a disappointed Safari user shopping online for a new pair of jeans. “The pages just reload continuously with no content.”
It’s unclear if Gap plans to restore Safari support on its websites in the near future. Representatives for the company were not immediately available for comment. Source: AppleInsider
Use Firefox. This is yet another bug with Safari (we saw similar behavior with some of our online documentation sites that make use of JavaScript–all other browsers worked just fine). Of course, knowing Apple, you’ll probably have to wait for 10.5 for a fix…
“Designing for 90% of browsers is our policy? Here’s a question. If I answered 10% of the sales calls with ‘Hello [companyname], could you please f*** off”‘, how would that affect our sales?” ~ Seen in Argument over web standards.
Our family has four Apple computers running Tiger/Safari in our household – sorry Gap, but we won’t be shopping for ourselves, our kids, our relatives or our friends at Gap, Old Navy or Banana Republic this holiday season. If you’re looking for examples of intelligent non-biased site design try Patagonia, REI and Lands End – that’s where I’ll be spending my time.
I would appear that you have prefered to lock yourself into the 10% of the population that still doesn’t understand that for as bad as MS Windows is, it still has brought the majority of the population together on the same page. You are obviously to young to remember what it was like when the OS’s were on a ROM chip and not compatable with any other computer’s OS.
Hang in there, they may still address your personal problem.
Lynn
Lynn, I am assuming you’re just baiting people here. Mac users don’t run inferior systems. A Mac is designed from the beginning to support the graphic OS. The issue has nothing to do with whether you think Windows is better than Mac (It isn’t). Its that a major company has been callous enough to eliminate access by what is probably a large segment of their customers, and drags their feet addressing the problem.
Make no mistake, though. It can’t have been done on purpose. I know if I ran an online store and realized that our web design firm screwed up like this, I’d have version 2.9 rolled back over version 3.0 before the next sun came up.