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Healthcare.gov isn't ready for all browsers

9/30/2013 04:10:00 PM
Tweetable
Matt Yglesias tweets:
So I went to healthcare.gov to check it out. I entered in my age range, sex, state of residence etc, and it took me to this page:

This was the page that was supposed to ask questions about my insurance status and what information I'm looking for, but instead I get a dead-end screen. So healthcare.gov is not totally without flaws. It turns out that this unintentional deadend screen was a compatibility problem with my favorite browser, Opera, since the website worked fine once I switched to the more common Firefox. (Why do I use Opera, you ask? It's because I like the "speed-dial" page. Unlike Firefox and Chrome which use a pointless and ineffective learning algorithm, Opera actually lets you select which pages, and how many pages, to put on the speed dial menu.)

Unfortunately, Opera does not have enough users to be on any web-developer's radar, so websites aren't optimized specifically for Opera, the way they are for Chrome and Firefox. I suppose the developers of Opera share some of the blame here, though I find that it is usually poorly designed, overly glitzy pages like Quartz.com (where none of the hypertexts work) that don't run well on Opera.