Webmasters should not rely on pop-ups for any site functionality (duh!)

I just tried to pay the Washington State sales taxes for SpamButcher.

I of course waited until the last possible minute (about 3 hours before the midnight-deadline). We do almost all our sales out-of-state - so filing the return is usually not that big a deal.

I managed to get all the online forms filled out and made my payment with about 2 hours to spare. I'm pretty sure my payment was sent - but something appears to have gone wrong in the process.

Washington State uses a third-party payment system which it launches in another browser instance after filing your return. The payment site seemed to have opened up alright. However, when I finished the payment process - it tried to pop open yet another browser instance - which seems to have gotten blocked by FireFox's pop-up blocker.

Pop-up Blockers are a Fact of Life (Webmasters - Listen up!)

So, now it's about 5 minutes until the midnight cutoff and my return is still listed as "Pending Payment Confirmation."

I have a time-stamped receipt for my payment - so I'm pretty sure I won't get penalized for being late. The bummer is that I may end up having to call the Washington State Department of Revenue to get this sorted out. I have a serious aversion towards this kind of thing.

The underlying problem is that someone counted on a very specific piece of browser-functionality cooperating with their site's architecture to make everything work.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that the site in question was relying on pop-ups for a critical part (payment) of a critical task (taxes).

For a longtime, almost all users could be counted on simply running Internet Explorer 5.0 or 6.0 (the differences are trivial). If you just tested your website on a given system running Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6.0 - you could be fairly sure that your site was working for maybe 90% of "typical" users.

This started changing around late 2002. Pop-ups and pop-unders were making web surfing a seriously painful task. People were starting to use alternative browsers like Mozilla (and later Firefox) which provided built-in pop-up control.

A number of other freeware and commercial tools were made available to perform the same task. A few years later Google and other companies released free toolbars to do the same.

Let's fast-forward to early 2007. Reasonable percentages of users could be using:

(this isn't even counting Linux, Macintosh or minor alternative browsers like Opera)

If webmasters plan on making critical site functionality dependent on pop-ups, pop-unders or otherwise launching new browser instances, they need to test on all the above configurations.

From analyzing my own web server logs - there seem to be a plethora of other random add-ons out there. A lot of them may be spyware - but users are still using them. Testing for that same 90% of users now requires a lot more work.

Even then, just understanding that your site is broken on FireFox 2.0 doesn't fix the problem.

The conclusion:

Webmasters should not rely on pop-ups for any site functionality.

"This site uses pop-ups. If you're using a pop-up blocker - you need to turn it off!"

While I have to give credit for the site author at least understanding they have a problem - most users aren't going to bother. This kind of harks back to the day when websites came equipped with notices like the following:

"This site is best viewed on Internet Explorer 4.0 with the screen resolution set to 1024x768 with 32,768 colors or better and a soundcard."

Do you think anyone ever bothered to reset their screen resolution?

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