wow, nook is totally committing suicide

[solarbird]

B&N is shuttering Nook in every location except the UK and US. Meanwhile, even here, Anna discovered that Barnes and Noble’s new website only talks to Internet Explorer on Windows. Nothing else will let her log in. If you look at the code, it seems to be testing for IE versions then throwing some obsfucated JavaScript code at you that doesn’t work on anything but recent Explorer.

For the record, Internet Explorer is currently about 12% of web traffic.

Interestingly, if I tell Safari to ID itself at IE 8 or 9, I can get a login box. It’s throwing different code in those cases. Identifying as IE 10 creates the same behaviour as the Safari user agent string. There are also some reports that for other people – at least some percentage of users – it works on Chrome on Windows. But it’s definitely not working here, tonight.

This is crazy. They’ve locked out as much as 88% of potential customers in North America. It doesn’t work on any Safari, including mobile. It doesn’t work on any version of Chrome, or Firefox, that Anna can find to test.

This is amazing. And once you do manage to get logged in, all you get really is a tile-display of books you’ve bought and no option to download them or anything – the links just go to those books’ sales pages. It’s a disaster.

I hope Kobo buys their Nook customer base soon, like they did with Sony. Amazon needs some sort of ePub competition. Nook clearly doesn’t want to be it.

eta: Apparently some people can log in on various shades of Chrome on Windows, but it’s inconsistent. Anna was able to log in on Safari on Macintosh this morning – for a while.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Comments

[telophase]

Weird. At work, my stats show that in the past year, Chrome has overtaken IE as the browser of choice. Even taking into account that we're a private university with a high concentration of Macs and iOS devices being used by the students, it's pretty amazing. Just a couple of years ago, IE was #1 by a huge margin.

[solarbird]

Only a couple of years ago? I thought it was longer ago than that. Huh.

But yeah, Chrome has swamped the market. It's pretty impressive.

[telophase]

I was wrong. It was less than a year ago that Chrome sessions overtook IE on our website!

It helps IE's numbers that all the computer labs are set up to default to IE as the browser if you don't go find the Firefox or Chrome icons, and I believe that any computer bought by students or faculty through the school that comes pre-loaded with Windows also defaults to IE. So everyone using Chrome is making a conscious choice.

My stats only start in February 2013, and at the time the order went: IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Safari (in-app). August 2013 was when Chrome (9065 sessions) overtook Safari (7453) in numbers. IE was still the leader (48462) at the time.

September 2014 was when Chrome (27248) overtook IE (21352). Safari was strong, but behind (14666). (Safari in-app was just 386 and Firefox was hanging on with 8851, down from its glory days of April 2013, with 15357).

Interestingly, I think it's the students driving it--over the spring semester of 2015 Chrome was solidly ahead of IE--in April we got 30K hits from Chrome and 20K hits from IE--but as soon as they left, the summer ratio reversed. May numbers are 14140 for IE and 13026 for Chrome, with June being 17355 for IE and 9513 for Chrome.

Which leads me to believe that maybe it's too damn hot to lug your laptop around, so everyone who is on campus is using the computer labs instead of bringing their laptops. And that faculty are hidebound and prefer to use the browser they're familiar with.

We'll see what happens in September!

(Huh. The bounce rate for people using IE is consistently higher than Chrome. Wonder if that reflects the difference between people just hitting the site for library opening hours or to reserve a study room vs. people who are doing more research?)

[solarbird]

Or possibly for people who open their browsers without closing previous tabs? Firefox doesn't do a tab refresh on reopen, maybe Chrome doesn't either. I'd rather expect that IE does. (Safari also does.)

[telophase]

That's possible. We've got a relatively high bounce rate, just because so much of the site is sending people off to different resources (catalog, databases, etc.) Might reflect people opening databases in a new window.