Sometimes speaking your mind pays off. As I reported a few weeks ago, Intuit was blocking users of Linux from accessing their Turbo Tax for the Web product. Many users (myself included) discovered that if we were to spoof IE 6 for Windows in our browsers we were able to file our tax information with no problem. After receiving much feedback from users, Intuit has adjusted their system.

As I also reported earlier, I’ve had a few email conversations with Bob Meighan, a Turbo Tax VP. As of late last week, Bob tells me that the “blocks” have been removed from the TTW pages. Some browsers may still be blocked, but you will not be blocked if you are using Linux.

Just to test it out, I logged in with Mozilla on my Slackware laptop and was able to get in with no problems, and had no trouble with the display of the pages.

As mentioned in the notes Bob forwarded to me, “The TTW experience is not optimized for Linux.” In other words, Linux is still not officially supported by Turbo Tax. If you have difficulty accessing a specific feature or with the display of your pages, you will need to hit the Turbo Tax forums or contact someone who has used TTW with Linux.

Going forward, however, I expect this will change. Upon receiving the complaints, Intuit investigated the situation and made the changes to allow customer access. Judging by email responses I received to my previous Lockergnome entries and the notes on the TT forum, there are many people using TT on Linux; if we continue to do so, and more Linux users file their taxes through TTW now that it’s Linux-accessible (even if not Linux-friendly), it may entice Intuit and other tax software vendors to start providing full support for our favorite OS.

Also, just to reiterate a previous point for folks who may soon use TTW for their taxes: when TTW first displays your tax forms, it expects to be able to use Adobe’s Acrobat Reader to display them inside a form-style window within the browser window. By all accounts, this does not work with Windows. However, your browser should prompt you to save the .pdf file to your hard drive, which you can later print at your leisure with one of the Linux .pdf readers, and you can continue on with your tax filing with no trouble. If you are e-filing, you’ll get another opportunity to save and print when the new paperwork is available.

Thanks again to Bob Meighan for being open to feedback and making himself available for Linux conversation.