Archive for July 2009
Iberia on-line check-in doesn’t work with free software
Apparently, there are still some 1990s-era websites which haven’t noticed that the web is not Windows. I realized this today when attempting to check in for an Iberia flight using my Ubuntu system and Firefox.
Someone thought it would be a good idea to use JavaScript and ActiveX to check whether the user has installed Adobe Acrobat Reader. If they don’t, it displays a helpful message:
Error message from Iberia on-line check-in
…and refuses to continue. After all, if you might not have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, why bother trying to check in? I’m glad you asked. Because it’s not the only program capable of reading and printing PDF files!
You may have noticed that the message offers us some information, just in case the script got it wrong. Perhaps it tells us how to continue checking in despite having different application preferences than their developers? Unfortunately, no. Instead, it explains how to configure Windows to use Adobe Acrobat Reader as the default PDF viewer:
Helpful guidance for configuring your Windows system
I’m not the first one to discover this problem, as a quick search turned up instructions for working around the problem (Spanish, English translation) from September 2008.
