Sadly, MTV appears to be a Microsoft whore.  I went to their site today to read the entertainment news and to either prove or dispel a rumor I heard yesterday about Linkin Park.  I clicked a link to read “more” news than what was shown on the main news page and was greeted with this:

PC Users with Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox: you need to run Internet Explorer to use MTV Overdrive.

That is quite disappointing.  I said before that web developers should code to standards and not to specific browsers.  What does MTV do when someone is running Linux?  And what about Macintosh users?  And what about people who don’t want to run IE because it’s full of security holes and doesn’t implement web standards correctly (or, at least, less correctly than other browsers)?  In essence, MTV is saying that it’s easier to subject users to possible security breaches and a substandard web experience than to code to W3C standards.  Pitiful… Just pitiful.

I know that IE still does not consistently display my own site correctly.  This is not because the site is incorrectly coded.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  My site is fully CSS and XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant (among other standards).  If Microsoft would fix the rendering engine in IE so that it correctly interprets and displays standards-based pages, this wouldn’t be an issue — but it still is and has been for years (as long as MS has been developing browsers, in fact).

I’m sorry that MTV has inept web programmers who are unable to see beyond Microsoft’s Internet Exploder while coding applications for a world audience.  I’m sorry that they try to force people to change their computing habits just to view their site content.  Sorry, guys, but that’s not how the web works.  The point is to be accessible to as broad an audience as possible, not to cram your own small-minded technology views down the throats of others.

I’ll not be visiting MTV’s site anymore.  I’d rather get my entertainment news from an organization which believes that its visitors should be able to decide on their own how best to access the site.

Oh, and another thing.  This also negates all accessibility standards that I also previously mentioned, so PC users who are blind and must use a “reader” rather than a “browser” are essentially screwed out of using MTV’s site as well.  That’s discriminatory, and it shocks me that MTV would support such blatant exclusionary practices.  Shame on you!