From: "Rich Gauszka" 

  "To access the ACE Secure Data Portal you need a high-speed internet
connection and Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. Please note that the ACE
Portal does not function properly with Mozilla Firefox."

http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2007/06/us_customs_incl.html?sou
rce=NLC-GRIPE&cgd=2007-06-19

There is a lot of concern these days over whether those responsible for
securing our borders are up to the job. So it's a bit unsettling to learn
that they seem to think it's a good idea to force overseas businesses to
use that most insecure of browsers, Internet Explorer, in order to
communicate online with U.S. Customs.



"Maybe I'm just naive, but I can't believe a federal government that
spent X millions of dollars pursuing Microsoft on antitrust charges
wouldn't make all their websites usable with browsers other than IE,"
a Canadian reader recently wrote. "The Automated Commercial
Environment (ACE) website that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has
implemented to enforce that all cross border shipments be electronically
submitted to CBP beforehand requires IE5.5 or later and continually reminds
a Firefox user that the site is only certified for IE. It's not as though
the site doesn't really work with Firefox as near as I can tell, but
getting these constant reminders while trying to enter data pretty much
makes it so."



A FAQ on the ACE website states plainly that:



  "To access the ACE Secure Data Portal you need a high-speed internet
connection and Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. Please note that the ACE
Portal does not function properly with Mozilla Firefox."


Entering the main part of the ACE website (which requires a valid
registration), a non-IE user is immediately marked for trouble.
"That's where the fun starts," the reader wrote. "A dialog
box pops up when you try to enter that notes what browser you have and
warns 'In order to use this site you need to install and run Internet
Explorer 5.5 or higher' with an
'OK' click box to continue. After you click OK the same warning dialog box
pops up again, and after clicking OK again you get the site, but as soon as
you click one of the site's buttons to navigate to a different page you get
the box again, and again after clicking OK. That happens again -- i.e.
twice -- when trying to access the next page. I could say it happens every
time you access a new page, but by this time I'm totally fed up and move to
an old W2000 machine we keep around for times like this."



Such times occur far more often than the reader, whose company uses
Thinstation clients running off a Linux server, had expected. "In
fact, we've pretty much made the decision to go back to Microsoft because
there are just too many sites and standalone software packages, many
specific to our industry, that require either IE or an entire MS client to
run. Even with the full Crossover license we still can't get most of them
to work properly. One feature on the CBP site that I've also seen on a
customer's procurement site is the little plus sign that indicates a
directory tree but that feature isn't displayed at all in Firefox."



Just as the ACE site forced him to use IE with its constant stream of
warning messages, the industry at large is wearing him down with a lot of
minor incompatibilities. "Speaking of security and IE, our facilities
management department recently bought a security camera system that you can
access from a browser, but it has to be IE too! And the sales guy didn't
even have a clue that other browsers existed or why you might want to use
one of them. And we recently committed to getting an ERP package as a SOA
implementation because it runs on an IBM iSeries (we didn't want the hassle
of managing one of those since we have no in house IT dept.), but you MUST
have MS fat clients to run the IBM Client Access software! Yes, there's a
Linux version, but the ASP doesn't support it."



Put in that light, the reader's experience with the Customs' automated
website should really have us all feeling much less secure. After all,
organizations that fail to support viable alternatives to Microsoft such as
Firefox are just making it harder for all of us to use the products we
think are best performing, least buggy, and most secure.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5