U.S. Customs Include Requiring Use of IE

There is a lot of concern these days over whether those responsible for securing our borders are up to the job. So it's a bit unsettling to learn that they seem to think it's a good idea to force overseas businesses to use that most insecure of browsers, Internet Explorer, in order to communicate online with U.S. Customs.

"Maybe I'm just naive, but I can't believe a federal government that spent X mil

There is a lot of concern these days over whether those responsible for securing our borders are up to the job. So it's a bit unsettling to learn that they seem to think it's a good idea to force overseas businesses to use that most insecure of browsers, Internet Explorer, in order to communicate online with U.S. Customs.

"Maybe I'm just naive, but I can't believe a federal government that spent X millions of dollars pursuing Microsoft on antitrust charges wouldn't make all their websites usable with browsers other than IE," a Canadian reader recently wrote. "The Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) website that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has implemented to enforce that all cross border shipments be electronically submitted to CBP beforehand requires IE5.5 or later and continually reminds a Firefox user that the site is only certified for IE. It's not as though the site doesn't really work with Firefox as near as I can tell, but getting these constant reminders while trying to enter data pretty much makes it so."

A FAQ on the ACE website states plainly that:

"To access the ACE Secure Data Portal you need a high-speed internet connection and Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. Please note that the ACE Portal does not function properly with Mozilla Firefox."

Entering the main part of the ACE website (which requires a valid registration), a non-IE user is immediately marked for trouble. "That's where the fun starts," the reader wrote. "A dialog box pops up when you try to enter that notes what browser you have and warns 'In order to use this site you need to install and run Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher' with an 'OK' click box to continue. After you click OK the same warning dialog box pops up again, and after clicking OK again you get the site, but as soon as you click one of the site's buttons to navigate to a different page you get the box again, and again after clicking OK. That happens again -- i.e. twice -- when trying to access the next page. I could say it happens every time you access a new page, but by this time I'm totally fed up and move to an old W2000 machine we keep around for times like this."