The QR code sent me to a website to install an app. Google Play store said the app was designed for an older version of Android and couldn't be installed on my device. I eventually found a "pay online" link hidden down the page a bit, then spent several minutes filling in my credit card number and what not. Then when I got to the part where I was to select the expiration month and year, the drop-down menus simply didn't work. I had no way to continue in my default browser, Firefox.
It had been 7 or 8 minutes, the cold was starting to numb my fingers, and I was no closer to actually paying for my parking space. I debated just canceling my appointment and driving away rather than risk a parking ticket, but I decided to give it just one more try in the Vanadium browser. Lo and behold, the drop-down menus worked, and after over 10 minutes of messing with a broken kiosk, a broken app, and a broken website, I was able to proceed to the point where I punched in my parking space number. Which, of course, wasn't marked.
At that point I looked up and down the side of the street and noticed a post with numbers for two spots behind me. I noted which number was bigger to infer whether my space would be one higher than the higher or one lower than the lower and punched that in. After my appointment I came out to find the car parked behind me had a parking ticket, while my car didn't. So I guess I managed to punch the right sequence of buttons on my phone to avoid a parking fine.
However the fact remains that I couldn't legally park my car in Salt Lake City unless I was in possession of a functioning smartphone and was running a Chrome-based browser on it.
Not sure if this is more a story of Chrome being the only browser that's tested and/or compatible with critical services I need to use to function in a major U.S. city or if it's a story about municipalities like Salt Lake City making things as difficult as possible for people so as to collect more revenue from fines.