Every fiftieth visit or so to the USPTO web site triggers a pop-up Customer Satisfaction Survey. The survey asks things like “How likely are you to return to uspto.gov?” (question 16) and “Do you intend to contact the USPTO Customer Support Centers to get information that you couldn’t find on the USPTO website?” (question 24.3) I have encountered this survey many dozens of times in recent months.
Today the survey popped up again for me, and I filled it out. The question that stuck in my mind the most today was this one:
The USPTO site works best in modern web browsers. Is there a barrier that prevents you from using the most up-to-date browsers? (question 30)
The problem with this question is its false premise. It’s just not true that the USPTO site works best in modern web browsers. Here are two counterexamples:
- Private PAIR and EFS-Web don’t work in Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
- If you try to do a TEAS filing in Chrome, you will find that the editing buttons (buttons for italic and bold and indenting etc.) are missing.
USPTO ought to scrap the Entrust Java applet that it uses in PAIR and EFS-Web, as I blogged in May of 2014.