Numerous MacDailyNews readers report that web sites for “The Gap,” “Banana Republic,” and “Old Navy” and no longer work with the latest version of Apple’s Safari browser. The sites attempt to reload seemingly endlessly with no content being displayed.
Gap, Inc. sites affected:
http://www.gap.com/
http://www.bananarepublic.com/
http://www.oldnavy.com/
Contact info:
– (800) GAP-STYLE
– (888) BR-STYLE
– (800) OLD-NAVY
Of interest, former Gap CEO Millard Drexler (now Chairman and CEO of J. Crew) currently serves on Apple’s Board of Directors and Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to sit on Gap’s Board of Directors.
[UPDATE: 10:44am ET: Added Board of Directors historical information.]
hmmmmmmm. Luckily I shop for clothes at Sam’s Club.
Are Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy all part of the same corporate family?
It sounds like a system wide Web site update has caused the problem.
Yep..All Same Corporate Family
works fine on FIREFOX….on my funky PC (forced to use @ work)
don’t work in firefox either.
…Yeah but it works in IE so who cares. (in your best 10y/o voice)
– I love that line.
Switch the User Agent to Windows IE 6 and it works fine. Crappy work around though.
Always have Firefox ready when Safari fails you
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Isn’t the CEO of the GAP et al also a board member at Apple? There’s some relationship between Apple and GAP et al.
I just called Old Navy and they were very apologetic and pointed me to Firefox. At least they did not try to tell me to use Windows. The woman with whom I spoke said that they were aware of the problem and that they were working on a fix to be implemented soon.
firefox loads all of ’em ok. this is not the first time i have seen safari handle things badly, which is why ff is now my default browser.
and as for the connection between apple and gap, didn’t gap just run a promotion “try on a pair of jeans and get free music from itunes” ?
MW:years as in “the browser debate is set to run for…”
They broke down in the latest version of Opera as well.
Don’t forget when e-mailing them to point out that they are also violating accessibility laws. http://www.anybrowser.org/ has some good form letters, and http://www.w3.org/ has developed some age old standards for building proper webpages that these guys should follow, and anyone else should follow to avoid the problem of not being able to be browsed by specific web browsers.
works fine with Netscape
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internet explorer works…LOL
Of course, the real twist to this story is that Steve Jobs used to be on the board of Gap Inc., and Mickey Dressler, one of Apple’s board members, is a former CEO of Gap Inc. I guess when some people stop playing, they want to take the ball home…
Looks like they did the update while I was fact-checking. That will teach me.
Omniweb has the same problem unless you set it to spoof as a recent browser like Netscape 7.2 or IE 6.0 in which case it loads but the page layout isn’t quite right. That’s why I like Omniweb, if a site doesn’t work many times there’s a way to change the settings so it will.
“Internet explorer works…”
No it doesn’t, at least not on a Mac. I tried it out of morbid curiosity (how did IE even get installed on this computer?), and received the following error message:
“We’re sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using. Our site works best with the following browsers…
Mac users
Netscape 7 and above
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above”
Yeah that’s the ticket…support a couple of obscurist hobbyist browsers on the Mac, but not the official web browser that’s built into the Mac. Yes yes, I know, every card-carrying Mac geek has at least three copies of FireFox installed on their system, but the other 99 percent of the user base uses Safari…
So now how am I going to go about looking like everyone else? Don’t tell me I have to go to the mall.
Good thing I just ordered a year’s supply of khakis.
i sent ’em the results of the w3c validator for each web site. nice output shows several errors and similar errors (tho not identical) for each site.
The Doctype for Gap.com is XHTML 1.0 Strict though the page does not validate.
can’t find an answer anywhere else – so I’ll ask here…
many folks use firefox as their default… I love the way Safari works, tabs,etc. I would use firefox if I could import my bookmarks, en masse, to firefox – but can’t seem to find out how…
any help : ^)
Not the solution, but yes, Debug>User Agent>Windows MSIE 6.0 works.
Safari 2.0.1 has been flaky in general. Hopefully, 10.4.3 will eliminate what seem like bugs (mostly random crashing).
Wow.
Banana Republic’s still around? I haven’t seen one of those in ages.