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Intuit hates linux
I just did my taxes online, using TurboTax like always. But this year Intuit added a “system check” to the process to make sure its customers’ computers run the Windows or OSX operating system and one of the major browsers (IE/Firefox/Safari). Intuit would not let my Linux+Chrome system into their site. This is strange because I had already begun a return about a month ago with no problem.
Here is the fix: Chrome supports a command line switch to specify a custom useragent string, which will fool Intuit into thinking it is speaking with a Firefox browser running on Windows:
$ google-chrome —user-agent=”Mozilla/6.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080827 Firefox/3.0.5”
While masquerading as such, everything on the TurboTax site worked fine - so why do they add these restrictions? Web standards are supposed to let us avoid this kind of silliness.
