The UPS website only works on Chrome

I've plenty to say about the UPS Shipping API and will post a few articles about it on this site. It's all pretty unwieldy, for sure.

But to begin with, here's a pretty fundamental problem with the UPS website itself: the UPS site only works on Chrome.

The UPS website is designed for Google Chrome and doesn't work correctly in other browsers.

I was having trouble using the contact form: it wouldn't let me submit it properly. This is the main contact form on the website, and it doesn't work properly. Oof!

Turns out that UPS's antiquated website only works properly on Google Chrome. When I spoke to a UPS tech support rep in a call-centre in Germany, they told me that the site doesn't work on my beloved Firefox. Moreover, they said it as though it were a perfectly normal thing to say.

I find this an unforgivable oversight. A contact form, of all things, should work properly on any browser. It's a website user's last resort, when all else has failed (and a lot has failed on the UPS site—trust me!). A contact form that doesn't work makes toiling with UPS's clunky online infrastructure even more Kafkaesque than it already is.

And it's hardly as though a functional contact form is a difficult thing to achieve. I've no idea what UPS has done to make its form work only on Chrome, but, whatever it is, there's certainly a better way they could have done it!

Google Chrome is by far the dominant browser in the world, but there are at least two reasons why this shouldn't make a difference to UPS:

  1. At time of writing, Chrome has a market share on desktop of just under 65%. This leaves just over 35% of people who don't use Chrome. UPS's design choice prevents a fat chunk of the global population from using its site.
  2. Not everybody has access to Chrome. For instance, many company-issued computers restrict the software available to employees, and you may not be able to install Chrome on your machine. (I've been stuck with Edge and Internet Explorer(!) often enough.)

"But I can load the site just fine outside of Chrome..."

It's true that I'm using a broken contact form to write off an entire website. However, the fact that the most basic and fundamental of website tools—the humble contact form—isn't designed to work outside of Chrome puts the entire website in doubt.

As a Firefox user, I can't be certain that I'm not living in some Platonic cave, in which I'm only experiencing a shadow of the full functionality of the UPS website. The implicit trust between a user and the website of a household-name corporation is broken.

I don't think it can be emphasised too strongly how much of a poor show this is. You really can do better, UPS!