
While testing the Flash plug-in for Linux and the very nice Preferences Toolbar we decided to switch to the IE 5.0 for Macintosh user-agent on Microsoft's MSN Video web page.
The result was a warning page telling that our browser and OS combination was unsupported - as a result of the browser user-agent sniffing by Microsoft's servers - but what really caught our attention was the recommended browsers: IE 6 or 7 - predictably- but Firefox 2.0 as the second option, both on Windows and on Mac OS X.
The message, verbatim, reads: "We recommend the following browsers: Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and FireFox 2.x on Windows XP SP2, Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 2.x on Windows Vista, FireFox 2.x on Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger".
So, we guess that Microsoft is still not aware of the Firefox 3.0 release, yet.
Besides highlighting the pitfalls of recommending a given version number instead of just "the latest version of..." in an error page - specially considering the fast-moving world of web related software - it's good to know that Microsoft is not even recommending Safari for Mac OS-X users.
Or perhaps they do like plenty of web designers and just test its site with the two most common browser engines, IE and Mozilla?