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just use http://www.pcfinancial.ca/ to avoid all of those issues. nothing you describe is part of my experience as their customer.

Both PC Financial and INGDirect offer "no fee" accounts that actually pay some interest and actually have no fees. We have been using PCF for more than 12 years now as our primary bank with quite high satisfaction - there are kiosks in most grocers across the country since all of them are pretty much owned by the one evil corporation Lowblaws, and CIBC ATMs are also available for all services with no fees.

http://www.pcfinancial.ca/
http://www.ingdirect.ca/

Our local credit union choices are not as good as out in BC, where VanCity has gotten as large and ubiquitous as any of the major banks. Our US Credit Union account is still being used, but since our mortgage and investment company got purchased by Bank of America a while back, we now have a BoA chequing account.

My Canadian bank offers 3 months worth of records on line as well.

If you want a Canadian bank that offers full history records for free, PC Financial will serve your needs (and almost never charge you a service fee, to boot!)

Really? This must be some time ago. I haven't encountered any problems with most government (CRA, Statcan (census) and the like) or bank websites and I'm running Firefox on Linux and Safari on the Mac (which is a minority browser). The only exception is the Air Canada site, which seems to be IE centric.

In fact the Canada Revenue Agency website even supports Opera, among other things.
http://www.netfile.gc.ca/browser-e.html

CIBC, Royal Bank, ScotiaBank, TD Bank, PC Financial all support Safari and other minority browsers
http://www.cibc.com/ca/legal/browser-security.html
http://www.royalbank.com/online/faqindex.html
http://www.scotiabank.com/cda/content/0,1608,CID43 57_LIDen,00.html
http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/ebanking/sup-br.jsp
http://www.banking.pcfinancial.ca/a/security/whatW eDoPopup.page#more_secure_browsers

In Canada, Superstore/Loblaws/Extra Foods (same company, different store names) has recently started selling pay-as-you-go mobile service. They already offer banking and insurance services and have done so for several years.

Given this trend, I would not be at all surprised if they started selling VOIP service, amongst other things, in the near future.

My bank, PC Financial, has always worked in Firefox, as far back as I have used Firefox (and that's since around 0.6). They also have no service fees for any ordinary banking, including Interac (no transaction limits either). Just FYI.

Our biggest grocery store chain has a no fee banking package!

Why a grocery chain got into banking, I have no idea. But whenever you buy stuff at any of their stores through debit, you get points towards your grocery bill.

You can find the details here.

I use President's Choice Financial You get 17 characters for my password there.

No fees. That's why I use them.

I meant when you go to the store and pay with your bank card, if the store uses CIBC for their debit machines (the direct payment dealies) and you use Royal, Royal charges you ~$1.

I use a subset of CIBC - President's Choice. Unlimited free debit transactions (on any machines), unlimited computer banking, unlimited free use of CIBC bank machines. No monthly fee, no minimum balance. You also get points towards groceries for paying your bills.

Horrible customer service, next-to-nothing interest, but it's the best deal I could find.

http://www.pcfinancial.ca stop getting raped.

You mean sort of like this?

Free online and telephone banking, free use of their ABMs, free cheques, free bill payments, free debit card purchases, and even free loyalty points!

but they are going to send you junk mail to pay for it.

Don't think they send you junk mail, but I'm pretty sure they sell your banking habits... which is probably the reason I use my good ole' trusty Credit Union.

You: "Anti-Bank-Missile???"

Quite the opposite. The White Label ABM business means that big banks make money. Here's How: Canada's biggest bank and one of the top 10 in North America, the RBC Financial group (formerly Royal Bank) co-owns one of the white-label ABM companies!

So let's say I am a Royal Bank customer. (This was true up until a short time ago.) Royal bank gets my money in their account and pays me less than a dollar in interest per year. And then I go to a white label machine, pay the $1.50 disloyalty fee which goes straight to RBC, pay the ABM fee to the white label company (which RBC co-owns) and then I don't use up the receipt-paper, evelopes, cause wear and tear, etc. on Royal's own machines. It's a good deal for RBC and a bad deal for me.

The bottom line is that my bank makes more money if I go to the white label machines! Even if I go to another bank's machines, I am paying Royal's disloyalty fee and making them extra money. (I pay no fee if I use Royal's own machines.)

And a note for Canadians: If you are tired of stupid bank fees and low interest rates on your balances, consider President's Choice Financial. I am a satisfied customer and do not work for them. Sure, it's owned by CIBC but I've never paid a cent in fees, I get free internet banking, free phone banking, free chequebooks, free Interac at CIBC machines, the 'points' rewards are worthwhile and attainable, and the interest rates are decent. (There are some minor downsides like spotty support for ATMs outside Canada, and most depoits over $200 except auto-payroll are delayed for 5 days so they can make interest on it. I can live with it.)

where there has not been at least one of the arrival/departure screens showing 'This program has performed an illegal operation'. And I visit a fair few international airports.

Just because the displays use Windows doesn't mean anything. It was probably easier for whoever developed the system to develop it on Windows. For all you know it could be getting all of the data from a Linux server. I have seen other cases where Windows is only used as the front end. Banks, for example. PC Financial uses Win2k workstations that connect via IBM's client access to an AS/400. The workstation might crash but it doesn't do a thing to the server.

Well, if I use a debit card the fees are less for the store maybe (actually zero for the store), but lots more for me.

At least here in Canada, I get charged something absurd like $1.25 a purchase.

I'm in Canada, and do most of my banking through either ING Direct and President's Choice Financial. They charge no monthly fees and no transaction fees.

I believe that the U.S. branch of ING Direct is very similar.

You can still do some stuff without paying fees, but it takes a bit of effort.

Not only do you get a free bag of cookies when you sign up for a borrowing account, there are no fees, free cheques, and 2.25% (last I checked) interest on your savings account. Mozilla and Konqueror work fine and I just imported my transactions for the past few months into GnuCash this evening. Everything looks great. I couldn't recommend it more.

GnuCash's stability leaves something to be desired, but that's neither here nor there. I'm sure the developers are working hard on it. Thanks guys.

And don't forget to do the converse as well! Tell your bank when they are doing something right! This way they will know that their efforts are paying off in the form of more loyal customers. It is the only they will know that they should continue such things.

I recently wrote these folks to tell them what a great job they were doing supporting web standards and allowing me to use the service on my terms and not theirs. (Linux/Mozilla works perfectly.)

My banking experience under linux is mostly positive. Four banks worked fine, but one was a total stinker.

Royal Bank - never had a problem under mozilla and linux or anything, for that matter. There was an unsupported time period for netscape 6, but it worked for me.

CIBC - works fine under netscape 4.x on linux but not on mozilla. Site is not actively hostile, the logon just doesn't work.

ScotiaBank - the pits. Terrible. A year or two ago, insisted on some bizarro win32 extra-security client. Left and haven't been back.

ING Direct - works fine with netscape /mozilla.

President's Choice Financial - works fine with netscape/mozilla.

Disclaimer: AC because I work for one of the above banks.