Making Headlines

Though seemingly functional on alternative platforms, the popular state-run portal appears to be specifically blocking out a good portion of the state's web browsers from searching and applying for federal jobs.

Though time and time again, we've advocated not using browser-detection code in websites, it would appear that some sites haven't yet bought the arguments. Certainly the code is not effective – as the reported browser version can be easily changed in most of all the available alternative browsers. We've taken the following screen shot from one of our computers running a Firefox web browser on a Linux workstation:

Our brief informal tests seem to suggest that indeed there's no inherent technical reason why the site would fail on our Linux test platform.

Its would seem to be in the better interest of a democratic society, for the state and local governments not to impose or mandate any one or two vendor's software when browsing public records in an otherwise open file format. This would seem doubly so when the government is even going out of their way to lock out other platforms, and spending extra time and money to do so.

We've sent a friendly notice to the Florida State Technology Office asking for any official comment on the matter. For an otherwise very useful and nice-looking site, we're hoping that this is just an overlooked technical glitch. A thanks goes out to "Morph3ous" in Gainesville for initially bringing this to our attention.