Acorns

While filing income taxes with TurboTax Online this year, my wife and I ran into some problems. When we first visited the site, were faced with a browser incompatibility message while running Firefox on Linux. Only Windows and Mac OS X are supported.

There was some buzz about this a back in 2005. This is our third year using TurboTax Online on Linux. In 2006 and 2007, we had to do some "view source" hacks at the end to find the URL of the PDF to print, but the rest of the process worked perfectly in Firefox on Linux.

This year, these work-arounds got our taxes filed on Linux:

• Use the Firefox User Agent Switcher plugin. It comes with a profile for IE on Windows, but that won't work. You need the profile for Firefox on Windows
• When asked to print your return, TurboTax says you are missing Acrobat Reader even if it's installed. Look for the option to open using a different program... and then open with Acrobat if you like.

No "view source" hacks necessary.

I can understand not making all the details of TurboTax work on all platforms and not listing Linux as a supported platform. But do they really need to explicitly ban unsupported combinations? I guess it's a little like making you type "I accept the risk" in a configuration file to make sure you know that what your are about to do is "most emphatically not for sorcerer's apprentices".