As of yesterday any Rogers ISP customer that types “apple” in Safari or FireFox toolbar is no longer getting to apple.com. Instead they get redirected to the following page that displays Rogers/Yahoo search results alone with commercial advertisement.
Despite obvious issues with Net Neutrality, Rogers brakes one of most usable features browsers provide that is auto completion of standard domain name extensions, such as .com or .net
Most of browsers but IE have been providing this extremely useful feature to their customers for years. I can’t even remember when i had to actually type in a domain extension. Only for international domains such as .ru, co.il, etc.
It is also interesting how Rogers implemented that. At the bottom of the page there is a link to more information. When clicked one gets an option to disable the page.
Rogers Cookie based implementation
Rogers keeps cookie on your machine that prevents the page to be shown and makes it clear that if you happen to use any internet privacy app that cleans up the cookies you will see their search page again and again.
Another interesting thing is that even when you choose not to use their “option page” you sill won’t be able to just type apple and get to their page. Instead “Page cannot be found” error displayed.
Page can't be displayed
Summarizing: If you happen to be a happy Rogers Cable customer wave goodbye to a nice URL auto completion feature in all of your browsers until Rogers makes changes on their end…
Tags: browser, DNS, Rogers, unfair practice, usability
August 16, 2008 at 10:13 pm |
good
August 19, 2008 at 9:20 pm |
[...] — or rather I thought enough people would complain that it would be discontinued pretty fast. The blog Useable Design does a pretty accurate job of capturing what makes Rogers new ‘feature’ so ridiculous (with [...]