Beijing Olympics on Safari is a nonstarter

The official Beijing Olympics website is great to look at, but sadly, does not work under Safari on the Mac. Here’s what it looks like:

 

Olympics awry on Safari. Click for larger image.

As opposed to what it should look like when rendered using Firefox on the Mac:

 

Olympics on Firefox. Click for larger image.

It’s not as if Firefox is hugely popular in China either. Firefox 3 has managed only 721,524 downloads as of 2nd July 2008 in a country of more than 150 million internet users. 

I guess most of them use Internet Explorer?

Next to the UN perhaps the most international forum in the world (and certainly more telegenic) deserves to be as platform and browser agnostic as possible. That the IOC and the Chinese have made a site that isn’t compatible with a major browser that is the default on many Macs is a problem. 

But I guess this particular problem pales into insignificance when juxtaposed with some of the other issues related to China’s exceptional approach to the Internet.