Incompatible web sites, playing wmv video on mac

Question

I am an expert pc user switching to mac...
I realized when I made the switch that they would be software that worked with PC that would not work with MAC. What has really surprised me, is there seems to be many web sites that will not work with MAC and its browsers.
This started with a conversation with apple support, where they indicated there were incompatible web sites.
My business bank stops you cold and says you have to use IE; you can ignore it and move on and it seems to work ok.
The Walgreen pharmacy web site has a drug cost calculator that also says you must use IE, and you cannot move on.
What really concerns me are the ones that give you no warning, but just don't work. If you go to
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/default.aspx?tabid=777
under the title of Video introduction:
Mac Firefox - nothing displays for the video player
Mac Safari - the video player displays, but the video will not play.
PC IE - everything works as expected.
The video format is wmv, which is an industry standard. I installed flip4mac, which is supposed to allow you to view wmv in quicktime, but it did work. Even after downloading the video (a link), I could not watch in on the mac. I had to go to a PC.
This type of silliness is exactly why I am running from a PC. Now I am finding it prevalent on the mac.
Question 1) specific to the wmv file format, how do you get it to run on mac?
Question 2) is this just the way it is? You cannot depend on web applications working at all with mac?
thanks!
bob

Answer 1

Hi Bob,
Ok, I'll bite
Apple has to understand that we don't care about who is at fault for web sites not working with Mac
The WebKit team are more than aware of that fact, and where possible they work with popular websites to get them to correct their websites or add specific 'kludges' into the WebKit code to specifically support these sites.
Apple has the ability to have an IE mode in safari to handle these situations, but hey choose not to
I've not heard that before. Can you quote a source?
If it takes IE compatibility mode to handle all web sites, then just do it.
That of course costs money. And then there's the prospect of Apple having to license Microsoft's DRM solution to provide 100% compatibility with Windows Media files. As we all know, Apple like good P.R. as much as the next company and handing something like that to Microsoft is never going to happen.
Microsoft clearly won't provide updated WMP technology for OS X as it gives them nothing, other than the extra impetus for people to switch away from Windows.
So we're stuck with essentially badgering the broken sites to fix things, or going somewhere else (and spending our $$$ there if needed).
The bar for a college student is much lower
True, but today's college student is tomorrow's business person and Apple products are very popular with college students these days. Apple are in this for the long term. Things will change, but we have to live in the real world and know this isn't going to happen soon.
The truth of the matter is that the sooner Microsoft get on board with being a responsible web-citizen then the better it will be for everyone (and by everyone I don't just mean Apple users, but anyone connected to the internet).
Almost [1 in 3 browsers on the web are not Internet Explorer|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usageshare_of_webbrowsers] - that's a huge number and businesses on the web need to be aware of this.
Please please please do not get me wrong - I would love it if Safari (or Firefox, or Opera, or Chrome, or ...) could handle every site that IE does but it's never, ever going to happen.
Cheers,
Ben