I have run into a couple of problems with Blockbuster's online movie rental program. It is virtually the same as NetFlix, only it's a bit cheaper and they give you one free movie rental a week. But I have found a couple of problems, aside from the longer turn around times in shipping the movies back and forth.

Jennifer and I waited for a movie, "Sliding Doors" for a couple of weeks. It was in the first spot in the queue the entire time, the status said available now, yet it was skipped. I even tried removing it and putting it back on, to no avail. Then I found this in their customer service FAQ:

Our goal is to ship your movies as quickly as possible in order to meet the expectation of 1 to 3 business days for receipt. We review all "Available Now" titles in your queue, and determine which titles are available for 2-day shipping at your nearest distribution center(s). If the requested title is outside the 2-day shipping window, it will be skipped over for a title further on your list.

We understand this may be frustrating if you are waiting for a specific title that is continuously being skipped. We are currently reviewing this process in order to improve in this area. We appreciate your patience as we do this."

So essentially they are saying that, unless the movie being skipped is the only movie in your queue, you may never get it, which was my experience. It sounds like they don't have the inventory they need.

Ok, whatever. We can use our free coupon to get it. So I went to print out the coupon using FireFox and it was TINY. I mean, very small but still ledgible. Being a web-developer, I know this is an easy fix, so I sent an email telling them about the problem using Windows XP and FireFox...an increasingly common configuration. In fact, the majority of hits on my blog are using Firefox.

Here's the response I got from customer service:

Thanks for taking the time to write to us, Jacob. Please be advised that Internet Explorer is the preferred browser for our website and is the primary browser which our technical team has tested. You may find that other browsers such as Mozilla/Firefox, AOL/Netscape, Safari, and others are not completely compatible.

Huh? We're not talking about ActiveX controls or some other proprietary crap. This is a javascript window that displays HTML (sloppy HTML at that). With that kind of attitude, Blockbuster is quickly working themselves out of a large market as IE is becoming less and less popular and isn't even supported on Mac. You can run IE on Linux, but it takes some work. Then again, why?

If I was a Linux or Mac user and didn't want to run IE, I'd switch to NetFlix.