Comments

Licence to print money — 16 Comments

  1. A similar thing happened to me while trying to book a hotel didn’t seem to work in Firefox but worked fine in edge.
    I then got 4 confirmation emails some 4 hours later! it seems in Firefox, while hanging on the payment page, it still made the booking and took my money… just refused to do anything to tell me it worked.
    Getting the refund wasn’t to bad once I had convinced the girl on the phone that four bookings for the same room on the same nights was an actual mistake!

    • In the normal course of things I generally have no problems with Firefox. Sometimes they do something daft in which case I switch to Waterfox [a fork of Firefox] until the problem is fixed. Luckily I haven’t yet bought anything four times over……

  2. In the UK, a licence only needs to be renewed on reaching 70 and that’s free of charge.
    To be fair to the UK Government (which comes hard at times), the system’s excellent – last Tuesday I completed the online form to renew Mrs M’s licence and by Friday it arrived in the post, a plastic card including her photo auto-snatched from her passport record.
    The only flaw, of course, is that she had absolutely nothing to do with the process, I did it all without any input from her whatsoever, so much for on-line security. . . . .

    • Our lot would charge you for sneezing if they could find a way to do it. I was amazed at the “no fee” to be honest, but then a lot of things seem to be free once you hit a golden age. I have yet to see if the licence appears in the post though.

  3. Grandad,
    I may have mentioned this before but Firefox seems to get a tad less usable and reliable with every so called up-date. I now have four sites unreachable. Enter user name, hit proceed… dead.
    I’ve tried every ‘Security’ and cookie setting with no joy.
    All sites ‘work’ in Chrome but, interestingly, one of the four is also unreachable in Edge.
    And don’t get me started on the new Google News layout…

    • As I said to Pete J bove, I switch to Waterfox if Firefox screw things up. The two are virtually interchangeable – Iirefox profile into Waterfox and carry on where I left off. I first discovered WF when FF did an upgrade that screwed up all my add-ons. WF did the trick and restored everything.

      I don’t like Chrome/Chromium. It just looks wrong!

  4. What’s the betting that your gubmit are getting backhanders from Google, and part of the deal is to (try and) force people to use their own browser? Also, have you looked into the “Web Components” aspect? I’ve been finding a number of sites are now reporting “Your Browser Is No Longer Supported”. I use Palemoon, and their forum says this often involves sites created/hosted on Wix, who seem to be jumping ahead with this Google inspired technology. Have a look here:
    https://forum.palemoon.org/search.php?keywords=Your+Browser+Is+No+Longer+Supported
    You’ll see that Firefox are having to “Spoof” their User Agent string:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/01/01/mozilla-changes-firefoxs-user-agent-because-of-internet-explorer-11/

    • I haven’t come across the “browser not supported” thing so far. I rarely have problems which is why I was slow in trying Chromium. The only other site I know of that I have a problem with is RTE. Even in the days I worked there, their video streaming has always been shite. They were probably the last in the world to use Real Player. Their videos don’t work at all in Firefox – just a black rectangle…

  5. I think I paid for your licence (and a few more besides) – it cost me €55 to change my British licence back to an Irish one last yaer, despite the fact that I had an Irish one up until 2017

  6. I have to renew mine every two years.I need to be examined by a Doctor (at my expense) to certify that I am still warm and breathing and that I can still recognise a sight chart on the far wall of his office.After having a licence for the last 65 years i hope I can still carry on for another 20 or so.

    • I’m fairly sure that my next renewal will require a doctors certificate of fitness but no eye test. That’s no problem. Any time I need something signed by a doctor [or garda or solicitor or peace commissioner etc etc] I just leave it with the receptionist. She gets him “to witness my signature” and I collect it next time I’m passing.

  7. I had exactly the same experience as Mudplugger, very easy and the free update licence came back within 24 hours. Even more surprisingly I also had to apply for replacement EHIC health cards (now a GHIC) and not only could I get both our cards with one login, a friendly button asking if other family members needed one, those cards also turned up in less than a week. In other news attempts by a local charity group I’m involved with to change online banking access due to a change of treasurer are still ongoing after some 3 months, after being told by the bank that local charity trusts should not use online banking (so how to pay the bills!) they now want a legal deed to remove the existing treasurer’s access before they will add a different person – this is a major bank who have held the account since the 1960s! Complaints to the regulator are now on the horizon.

    • The IT systems in this country are a joke. Our health service was hacked two years ago and the whole system had to be reloaded from scratch [took nearly two years]. That’s what happens when you have an ancient system [Windows 7 ????]. Official websites aren’t much better. Even my own insurance company had me driven demented – three policies with the same company – have separate logins for two of them and I can’t access the third at all.

  8. Government sites don’t need to bother about Browsers. If it doesn’t work you change it to something that does or they fine you for not updating your license and it didn’t work in Firefox won’t be seen as a valid excuse. They simply don’t have any competition so why should they care. And if you haven’t worked it out already I can assure you they don’t care.

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