As every other British blogger has pointed out now (sorry I’m late, spent the weekend in Edinburgh flathunting), the idiots at Odeon have shut down Matthew Somerville’s Accessible Odeon website. While, legally speaking, the site was a tad dubious, it was certainly not in any way harmful to Odeon’s business - the fact that anyone not using Internet Explorer on Windows couldn’t use their main site meant that he had (at his own time and expense) given them a way of accessing their cinema times and thus gave them extra business. While IE still holds the dominant market share, it is now falling (more on that later), so Odeon will be only be shutting out more and more potential cinema-goers. Odeon’s attitude is at odds to that of National Rail, who tolerate his alternative timetable site and have promised a revamp of their own. If Odeon had had any sense they would have ditched the interface designers and hired him in as a usability consultant.

Actually, I was curious as to who had designed it - according to Odeon, the usability criminals in question are Lateral, who (wisely) do not boast anywhere on their website that they designed the Odeon site. Though their other work is of a similar ilk, such as this Levi’s site with another frustrating interface.

Anyway, back on to the topic of Internet Explorer - one of the likely reasons for the drop in market share are the security flaws that have bedevilled it recently, with Microsoft recommending that users disable less secure functionality, and some security firms recomending ditching IE completely for something better, and avoid having to run updates every few days.

So, we can all switch to a new browser and the most we suffer is not being able to get tickets for your local Odeon? Well, not quite, as several banks (luckily for me, not mine) still do not fully support non-IE browsers for their online banking, so users are forced to still use IE for that particular purpose. Which is pretty stupid - for a site where your security is absolutely paramount, you’re being forced to use an insecure piece of software.