MSN adCenter’s Firefox, IE 7 & Safari Problems
MSN adCenter opened itself up yesterday for three hours of new BETA user signups and the marketing world was yet again reminded of the MSN trend of not having Firefox compatibility high on their agenda. Not only have Firefox browser users had problems with adCenter since it was first made available to select groups of testers, but today’s experiences account for security and browser issues across Firefox, Safari AND even Internet Explorer.
Brent Franson wrote about Safari problems on SEJ’s MSN adCenter announcement :
I discovered this morning that it can be very hard to use the new MSN adCenter if you are a Mac user. The adCenter is not compatible with Safari or Firefox…only IE 6 or above. Microsoft stopped offering IE 6 for Mac on January 31st of this year; they offer Safari as an alternative.
Again, the new adCenter is incompatible with Safari.
I hate Virtua PC almost as much as I hate IE…Will I be forced to buy a PC just to run MSN PPC campaigns? Well, that is one thing I am not willing to do.
MSN AdCenter & IE 7 from zunch’s ZEN-SEM :
Funny when you try and sign up for a service and you have to jump through a few technical hoops just to get it done. Like when Tyson (SEO Specialist) this morning was trying to create an MSN Adcenter account using IE 7. Adcenter kept spitting out an incompatible web browser error.
Looks like you have to revert back to IE 6 if you want to get anything done in MSN Adcenter. I would suggest not to switch your user agent header to IE 6 using the FF UA switcher either, the styles on all the forms break and you get a lot of form layer overlap issues.
Danny at Search Engine Watch even posted about the “Website Certified by an Unknown Authority” window popping up on sites which use the MSN adCenter conversion tracking script; something that has a great chance of stopping purchasers dead in their tracks:
Did you know that MSN ad center is not Firefox compliant? This should come as no surprise but the kicker is that the conversion tracking is not compliant either. Therefore, any merchant using the conversion tracking script will run into problems with their Firefox customers.
When they purchase something, they will be told that the merchant is pretending to be r.microsoft.com. Needless to say, this will be a problem for at least 10% of a merchant’s customers.
We called MSN and spoke to them. Their official solution is that we should switch all our customer service reps to IE6 and alert our customers that they should only use IE6 to purchase from us. Hmm, that doesn’t sound like a practical solution to me.
