Banana Republic designs for Web 1.0, by Jeffrey Veen

Banana Republic designs for Web 1.0

I had almost forgotten about the "browser wars" of years past, when publishers aligned themselves with rendering engines, and forbade their audience from entering without a "modern" browser. That all seems so quaint in hindsight - as if ESPN would do a deal with Sony so that SportsCenter was only viewable on a Wega monitor. Or something.

Yet I was whisked back to those annoyingly naive times today when I visited Banana Republic's newly redesigned site with Safari. I was ready to drop some cash on a few shirts (they've got a great line of tall sizes for freaks like me) when I was barred from entering -- as if they'd hired a bouncer with a velvet rope. Apparently, they've gone all Ajaxy with shopping carts that slide into the page. All quite nice, I'm sure, but I'm not going to switch browsers just to be their customer. Would you?

I would have thought that a savvy retailer like the Gap (who owns BR) would understand the business value of web standards. After all, Safari may only be a couple of percentage points, but can you really afford to take even that out of your profit margin?

The biggest irony: I couldn't complain. Even the Customer Service link is off limits to my browser of choice. Oh well...

Update: The redirect page on their site now reports, "We're working on supporting Safari. Please check back soon." And this humble post now ranks #5 for the query "Banana Republic" on Google.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 19 October 2005 at 11:42 PM. It was filed under Web Design.

Comments

1. On 20 October 2005 at 12:21 AM Andrew wrote:

Amazing timing. I was looking for shoes last night for a wedding this weekend and noticed the same thing. The only OS X browser I was able to access the site with was Mozilla v1.6; this includes Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Camino. Totally crap sniffing indeed. That was enough to dissuade me from purchasing anything whatsoever from their store. Horrible.

2. On 20 October 2005 at 1:11 AM Jochem wrote:

Well... no complain form needed, guess this has a bit more impact. I recently was faced again with the message that I should install Netscape or IE for Mac OS to visit the page... I have a few browsers running, but none of those two.

What is so difficult on cross browser development?

3. On 20 October 2005 at 1:32 AM Nathanael Boehm wrote:

Amusing how they say that your browser isn't supported at all ... yet they list the other browsers there under "works best with", as if the site supports MORE browsers than are in that list, just not as well.

Perhaps they need a "Works best in", "Works but doesn't look as nice as we'd like it to" and "He he - no site for you!".

PS: Jeff, in the past week my RSS reader has gotten the last entire 15 posts several times, as if you've edited the last 15 posts every couple of days ... are you? Or is there just some anomaly with the RSS feed??

Cheers,

4. On 20 October 2005 at 5:28 AM Timothy Appnel wrote:

It's pretty clear Gap Inc. isn't so saavy. They shut down Gap.com for nearly a month.

http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2005/09/gapcom_shoppers.html

So much for the "five 9's."

5. On 20 October 2005 at 6:01 AM Timothy Mills wrote:

Surprisingly this "works best with" screen is a great improvement from how the site was working in Safari two weeks ago. At that time when one visited the site Safari would just launch itself into an infinite loop of refreshing a blank screen.

And no, Jeff, I didn't switch browsers just for Banana Republic. I did however go down to one of their stores. So in the end they got my money anyway.

6. On 20 October 2005 at 6:39 AM Jeff Croft wrote:

Things are the same at gap.com (Banana Republic's parent company). After their redesign, the site no longer worked in Safari. That was a few weeks ago, and I haven't checked it since -- but I assume it's still the case. The irony is that Gap received some deal of praise from the standards community for their use of CSS layout and such.

7. On 20 October 2005 at 7:16 AM Luis wrote:

You should be angry at Apple for this, not Banana Republic. Of the major browsers, Safari has the worst javascript support, and in many ways the least-standards compliant rendering. Email them and demand that they make Safari more standards compliant or switch to Moz as the safari backend. [To their credit, they are working hard on these problems, but they could have been avoided by starting with mozilla/firefox from day 1 instead of trying to introduce Yet Another Renderer for developers to deal with.]

8. On 20 October 2005 at 8:34 AM wrote:

At my firm, we'll still include a "Best When Viewed With" page for anyone not using the browsers we use to test, but it's more of a warning -- it includes a link into the site.

We do our best to design to standards, but hedge our bets.

9. On 20 October 2005 at 8:36 AM Doug wrote:

Oh, the irony. Remember when Banana stores used to sport an African Safari-like theme for decor and brand?

10. On 20 October 2005 at 9:01 AM J.D. wrote:

If you have the debug menu enabled and change the User Agent then you are able to access the site with Safari, so it does work technically work, they are just blocking it by default for some reason.

11. On 20 October 2005 at 9:07 AM i just made this name up wrote:

when they initially launched their new site, i went to scout out some of their dress/casual pants, and the site was practically unusable in safari. the right side nav was in the middle of the page, and the actual content of the page was pushed down below the nav.

i sent them a semi-snotty email, and this is the response i garnered:

"Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding the enhancements we have made
to our website. We were sorry to hear you are not able to shop our site
using the Safari web browser. Customer feedback is very important to
us. In an effort to improve the shopping experience for everyone,
please be assured your comments will be forwarded to our Technical Team.
We appreciate the time you have taken to share your concerns with us and
hope you will give us another opportunity to serve you in the future."

i'm not quite sure how they expect me to be able to give them another opportunity to serve me in the future, when they lock my browser of choice out of their site a month later.

12. On 20 October 2005 at 9:08 AM Kevin Tamura wrote:

The irony of this is that up till the "official" relaunch of the site it worked in Safari, layout was a bit buggy though. If google can get Gmail and Google Maps to work why can't BR (gap) get their site to work?

13. On 20 October 2005 at 9:13 AM i made this name up, too wrote:

changing the user agent may get you in, but without it showing up as safari in their stats, they're just going to assume that no one in their demographic uses safari, so they won't bother attempting to make things in safari.

14. On 20 October 2005 at 9:23 AM DanD wrote:

Doug, I remember the front end of a Land Cruiser greeting me upon entry, which is why I thought it was the coolest store around when I was 8, even though I was always disappointed that there was nothing exciting inside.

I would imagine there is a disproportionate amount of Mac users among Gap shoppers. What ever happened to degrading gracefully?

15. On 20 October 2005 at 9:34 AM Ryan Oswald wrote:

so its their use of javascript for the shopping cart that is causing the problem? If they had "gone all AJAXy" with their javascript then wouldn't that be a positive?

16. On 20 October 2005 at 9:51 AM Brady J. Frey wrote:

Oh, I complained, via firefox, and then I did a gizmo call to one of the designers (no names, I used to work there) just to hear what was up - his response:
"You're not the only one who's complaining, whattya' think we're working on? Banana Republic site as well, it's the same reasoning. But these decisions don't always come from the trenches."

...but that was when I found out the GAP site was the same a few weeks ago.

I asked him I'm not sure if the quality of coders went down or if their head web developer is a moron -- in the end, it seems to be an oversight for cost vs quality here. While I know that many americans order online -- I've almost exclusively ordered products like this online for years now. Support the bleeding edge users, mac users I would argue are typically close to that stereotype.

Either way, a kick in the face, when it's not anywhere needed.

17. On 20 October 2005 at 10:12 AM Jeff Croft wrote:

Luis-

WebKit is absolutely considered one of the top two or three most standards-compliant rendering engines out there. While it may lag slightly behind Gecko in some areas (such as javascript), there is absolutely no excuse for not supporting it in a site that is touted as being "standards-friendly."

Safari is, by a longshot, the most common browser used on Macs, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Effectively, if you're not supporting Safari, you're not supporting Macs. Not supporting Macs in a day where Apple is one of the trendiest companies of any type is just plain foolish.

18. On 20 October 2005 at 3:38 PM Darryl Ring wrote:

As Kevin Tamura said, Google can make Google Maps and Gmail work. It better be some pretty amazing JavaScript magic if it's more advanced than Gmail and Google Maps.

19. On 20 October 2005 at 4:58 PM head zoo keeper wrote:

Yes, after switching my User Agent setting in Safari to Windows MSIE 6.0, I got the email address for the Gap online feedback: custser@gap.com.

Use it!

20. On 20 October 2005 at 4:59 PM head zoo keeper wrote:

Oops, sorry, that should be: custserv@gap.com

21. On 20 October 2005 at 5:50 PM Tantek wrote:

Seems to work just fine IE5.2/MacOSX (or rather I'm not seeing the same redirect page that you're seeing), at least for browsing the products, didn't try buying.

Note that we never had the chance to code XMLHTTPRequest support into IE/Mac. So perhaps it's something else?

22. On 20 October 2005 at 11:47 PM Charles wrote:

The truly strange thing is, the Gap and Banana Republic sites DO work with Safari. I set Safari (most current version with OS X 10.4.2) to spoof the user agent as MSIE 6/Win and everything works fine. Maybe it doesn't work in lower versions, but it worked fine for me in the latest version.
They didn't HAVE to block Safari, but they do a user agent detect and block all versions, even the versions that work fine. Maybe they could fine tune the algorithm a bit, and only trap out versions known not to work.

23. On 21 October 2005 at 12:47 AM Louis Catorce wrote:

What, you mean to say that the luxury class didn't get the usability memo... http://fourseasons.com

24. On 21 October 2005 at 4:30 AM Stephane Deschamps (nota-bene.org) wrote:

What's really funny is to imagine the Powers-that-Be at BR looking into their referer stats and ending up here, being criticised publicly by some of the most influent web people, just because their feedback form was not available to your browser.

Careful Jeff, comment #22 seems to be a link spam.

25. On 21 October 2005 at 9:18 AM Jon wrote:

In addition to custserv@gap.com, there's also custserv@bananarepublic.com. Perhaps enough e-mails will get the ball rolling where it needs to be.

26. On 21 October 2005 at 10:44 AM Nate wrote:

I have to second what Charles said. If you want to use the site in Safari, turn on the Debug menu with the instructions here:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030110063041629

Once the menu is turned on, open a new window, select "Windows MSIE 6.0" from the User Agent submenu, and go shopping.

Or not.

27. On 22 October 2005 at 6:03 PM Sean Corfield wrote:

I tried setting the Safari user agent to Mozilla 1.1 which let me into the site but it ran really slowly and several pages just simply didn't work at all. Makes me wonder just how complex they've managed to make the site under the hood... I mean, e-commerce sites aren't exactly rocket science...

Could someone who has browsed the site in a "Gap-compliant" browser explain how the user experience is so much better than a regular HTML e-commerce site?

28. On 23 October 2005 at 7:27 PM Tim wrote:

Has anyone else bothered to look at the html source of this page? It looked atrocious so I tried to validate it. They claim it is XHTML 1.0 Strict... it failed with 45 errors including a <head> element inside the body.

29. On 24 October 2005 at 4:17 PM Eston Bond wrote:

Jeff Croft said in Comment 17:

"Safari is, by a longshot, the most common browser used on Macs, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Effectively, if you're not supporting Safari, you're not supporting Macs. Not supporting Macs in a day where Apple is one of the trendiest companies of any type is just plain foolish."

It's also rather hypocritical considering Gap was giving out iTunes Music Store tracks a few months ago with denim purchases. Did they realise that iTunes is an Apple product and that it started on the Mac?

30. On 25 October 2005 at 1:11 PM Melissa Maxwell wrote:

I am not happy about this! I am a Mac user and a big shopper!
I used to shop on the Banana Republic, Gap and Old Navy (all one company) all the time. Now they do not want my business? Get with the program!

31. On 26 October 2005 at 2:43 PM richard wrote:

The question isn't necessarily what percentage of visitors to the Gap Inc websites are using Safari, it's what percentage of online sales is coming from Safari users, compared to what percentage of visitors they represent.

So if Safari users are 5% of the visitors but generate 7% of sales, it's pretty stupid to ignore them in the development process. If they generate 1% of sales in 5% of visits then maybe the cost/benefit calculation worked.

I'd be interested to know if Gap Inc is looking at things at that level of resolution or not. They can, and it should be informing their decisions at least as much as the PR implications for not supporting Mac browsers.

32. On 27 October 2005 at 11:28 PM praetorian wrote:

Firefox 1.0.7 in OS X 10.4.2 worked fine for me.

33. On 31 October 2005 at 10:06 AM Ryan wrote:

What BR, and other Safari unfriendly sites, need to understand is that, even though Safari users are 2-5% of the market (depending on who's research you're viewing), Apple users are generally in a higher income bracket. Let's face -- Macs aren't cheap. They (ie - retail sites) should take that into account before they support the big devil (IE).

That's my humble opinion, though. Take it for what it's worth.

Ryan

34. On 31 October 2005 at 12:51 PM Matt wrote:

Maybe they've been reading this blog. When you visit with Safari, the landing error message now claims that they are developing a Safari-friendly version of the site.

How do you debug for B.S.?

35. On 31 October 2005 at 2:33 PM JHenley wrote:

No, I won't go to the trouble of doing anything other than using my browser of choice - as I already use it - which means don't even make me think about debug. I tried to get into the site a few weeks ago to buy some gifts and immediately left when the message came up. It probably cost them over a thousand dollars and I probably won't waste my time by going back to site to attempt a purchase ever again. It's a costly arrogant stance.

36. On 6 November 2005 at 11:57 AM Ryan Clark wrote:

As others have noted, I also noticed this on Gap's site:

"We're sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using.
Our site works best with the following browsers:

PC users
Internet Explorer 5.5 and above
Netscape 7 and above
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above

Mac users
Netscape 7 and above
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above"

They don't make any claim about working on Safari. Strangely, their site was "open" to Safari users until just recently. There were numerous layout problems, most notably, the checkout form elements were misaligned, overlapping text and each other and running in a kind of diagonal line down from upper left to lower right.

37. On 8 November 2005 at 11:19 AM Dustin Wilson wrote:

The same thing goes for Old Navy. I'm an Opera user on OS X and Windows, but for some reason the browser sniffer that Old Navy uses is a bit specific with their sniffing for Mozilla, so Opera can't effectively spoof as Mozilla on OS X (the browser spoofing on non Windows systems in Opera needs to be a bit more powerful), but can spoof as IE 6 on Windows. Oddly enough, the website works perfectly with no layout problems in Opera on Windows when I spoof as Internet Explorer 6.

Being my arrogant self I e-mailed Old Navy about it, and got a reply to the effect "We don't have Opera, so we can't test in the browser." I e-mailed back stating, "Download it. Easy enough." A lot of corporations are either retarted or think you are.

38. On 14 November 2005 at 8:56 PM Margret wrote:

You know, after taking online college courses, I was basically forced to remove all other browsers exept IE. The classes just wouldn't work. So, being forced - I am an IE user. I have recently ordered online from Gap (after the new web changes) - now suddenly everytime I "quick view" something, IE shuts down completely. Same with old navy. Point is, they can't even get the site to work correctly with IE...wonder if I'll ever be able to shop there again? Hmmm...wonder how much money they've lost??? I have a cart with 4 items in it and can't get to the checkout...

39. On 16 November 2005 at 11:51 PM eviljimi wrote:

I just went for a nose at BR and got redirected to this URI:
http://www.bananarepublic.com/store-closed/BananaRepublic/storeClosed/en/index.html

"We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.
If you need additional help or information, please call 1.888.BRSTYLE."

I'm sorry, I'll just take my cash elsewhere.

40. On 17 November 2005 at 1:20 PM Guest wrote:

I know y'all are Mac hipsters, but it's worth noting that their sniffing is so terrible that Firefox 1.0.7 under Linux doesn't work either. Now that's just gratuitous, given that Firefox is essentially identical on all platforms.