So I visited the Microsoft Partner website today, to profile our Cobalt software licensing solution. To my surprise I found that it is broken in both Firefox and Konqueror ... in fact, it is broken in any browser except Internet Explorer on Windows.

I fired the Microsoft folks a bug report. They replied very quickly:

... we suggest you to use Internet Explorer (IE) as your browser when accessing partners sites which also includes the Microsoft Partner Channel Builder.

I am really sorry for this inconvenience that you are experiencing.

Prompt, polite and friendly support - my experience is that most companies could do with taking a leaf out of Microsoft's book when it comes to support - but not exactly a helpful solution.

Just use IE? It'll be 2010 tomorrow. Firefox is now the most popular browser in the world.

Microsoft has been evangelising a standards-compliant approach for years. They've even supported Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Silverlight. In fact I've been to a Microsoft event here in Melbourne where an evangelist was citing Moonlight as an example of how Microsoft doesn't want to create an IE-only Internet.

So how come the Partner site has been broken for nearly two years?

I've asked whether MS intends to fix the site, & if so, what the timeframe is. I'll update this post with details ...

Updated 31st December 2009: The same Microsoft staff member replied to say that she's escalated the problem to support. I must say I'm very impressed so far; I hadn't expected such short turn-around times from support over the Christmas period. Let's hope the fix is as quick in coming ...