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Online Banking And Browser Support
robbo writes "Earlier this week, The Register ran a piece on major UK banks and E-commerce sites' refusal to support alternative browsers for online banking, and they followed up with a list of saints and sinners. The reasons vary from requiring support for proprietary technology to security. My own bank only recently started supporting Netscape 6 (but they still don't support Mozilla). Clearly, support for Mozilla, Konqueror, or Galeon are absolutely necessary if projects like GNUCash can successfully integrate online banking. How does the Slashdot crowd find their banking support? Is your bank a sinner or a saint?"
i never had a problem with washington mutual
What about Opera masquerading as IE or netscape?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
My bank isn't online yet you insensitive clod.
Mozilla 1.1 works just fine at my little Credit Union (Only 2 offices).
So if a tiny little non-profit credit union can do it, then the larger banks should have no problem.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I hesitate to call any bank a Saint, but in at least this one regard, First Citizens are more Saint than Sinner.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
2 years ago Wells Fargo had an issue with the latest Netscape, but aside from that they've supported every Mozilla I've ever used.
Sig!
Kudos to Nationwide (UK Building Society), whose online banking site I've successfully used with Mozilla and Konqueror (3.0) as well as IE. Everything seems to work as it should.
It is about time that we allow the Open Source developer community full control to our financial institutions. With their vast experience in mutual fund trend prediction we can maximize the profits in our portofolios. These additional funds would allow the Open Source community to thrive in an environment where they can have access to the latest tools.
Only when we face great institutions head-on can we loosen the stranglehold that CitiBank holds in the lives of the average Mexican.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Wells Fargo is perfectly accessible with Mozilla and even Phoenix (go figure).
My local community college requires Netscape or IE for checking grades, though!
Think people. Yes, it's convenient. Convenient for people too lazy to write a check by hand, or go to a drive through teller, or something. Yes, some people may not have cars, but they find a way to get to work, don't they?
Now, the reason why I really hate online banking. Security. What's the thing we care most about securing. Our own asses. What's the thing we care about most besides ourselves? Our money. What's the most insecure thing we know of (besides Outlook Express or IIS)? The internet. Yay! Why not just throw a book of blank checks into a bar in manhatten, it's probably safer...
netbank rocks -- it's great for folks like me who move a lot and don't need physical bank access. Free bill payment, plus great interest rates and I don't think I've ever paid a fee for anything.
Works fine for me in Mozilla, and has ever since I switched to moz last year.
I used to be with SFNB, the first totally "online" bank, but when they were bought out a few years ago, they started charging fees like a regular bank, which kind of defeated the whole point of reducing transaction costs by being online.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I use Chase for a few credit cards and USBank as a primary checking/savings bank and I have had no problems with Mozilla (on Windows or Linux) since about Mozilla 0.8. I don't even have to turn on user-agent spoofing at all.
To make banks listen you have to speak in the only language they know: money. If their site doesn't support your preferred browser, close your account and make sure you let them know it's because they don't support you. Then just find another bank that does, it doesn't sound like it would be all that difficult.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
To be fair, it's probably not the Banks etc that set the terms to limit the browsers that access their sites. It's lazy developers, which are almost certainly web-dev companies trying to complete a project that they've managed to land by bidding low.
;-)
I've been guilty of it in the past - having to rush out a project, and not taking the time to test on every browser across every platform. The "IE only" disclaimer is an excuse for the most part.
It's worth complaining to the company though, especially if you mention they're being ridiculed on a number of extremely popular tech news sites
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
www.waterhouse.com doesn't work for beans in anything except IE, and the site has always been very cluttered and slow.
SouthTrust and Wachovia currently work with Chimera--how's that for support?!
Their servers might be secure, but your home PC is not! Any script kiddie can install a keystroke logger on your box, get your passcode, and pay *his* bills with *your* money.
I don't see any problem with this, really.
The banks are doing wrong something else; they are "developing" for certain browsers, while they /should/ be designing with accepted web standards.
Then there would be less problems. Web designers and browser developers can then both spend more time on adding functionality, because they only have to support 1 peer instead of n.
My bank, the Dutch ABNAMRO, states somewhere that they only support IE. But Mozilla works, although a tad ugly.
I always try and use Mozilla on FreeBSD when using Internet Banking and the only time I've had trouble is with Mozilla 1.0 (or ealier). I can't get past the login screen. Netscape 6.2.3 and Mozill1 1.1 work well.
Is the issue here whether the banks will *work* with alternate browsers and gnucash, or whether the bank will pony up a few techies to *support* it? Big difference -- I should expect the first, just based on the idea that they should be using standards. The second would be more understandable for them to shirk for a while more, since market share for linux desktops is still small, and generally a more tech-savvy crowd.
So far, my experience with using Mozilla (both 1.0 and 1.1) with People's Bank has been great except for one problem which turned out to be on my side. I ran into a problem with the People's Bank site not displaying correctly using Mozilla 1.1. I contacted support (since the site worked fine previously) and their official answer was that they didn't support Mozilla, though they are looking into it. It turns out that the problem was that I enabled HTTP Pipelining and their servers didn't support it. I turned it off and their site worked fine again. I contacted support and let them know. It would be nice if Mozilla allowed you to turn on HTTP Pipelining per site (e.g. a checkbox in the bookmark's properties) rather than global.
TD CanadaTrust is easily supporting alternatives. I have used both Chimera and Opera (IE masquerade) succesfully.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Things will only change if you actually do something about it. I *always* complain if I have the time, I will mail the webmaster and point out that there is an HTML standard, point them at a dodgy validation of their site via validator.w3.org, and point out that they lose money, one way or another.
So get off your ass, knock up a form letter, keep it handy, and complain!
The future is partly in your hands.
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
It could be a "her" you know ...
My primary online bank, Swedish Postgirot, "recommends" only IE. Since they also have a script to lock out users with other browsers, the recommendation could be like something from The Godfather. I complained to their support and one of their staff suggested that linux users could also use Opera (eg. masquerading as IE). I asked why I couldn't use a browser that is safe instead of IE, no answer so far. My other oline bank, Hongkong-Shanghai Bank Corporation will gladly admit anything and anyone.
According to the same article, Chase Manhattan's online web client has serious problems with stability, security and breaches of privacy as well as a severe lack of open standards at almost every level of the implementation.
Having used it, I can vouch that this is true. The GUI is exclusively ActiveX, which works only on some versions of IE. I have to assume there is some windows web/db system driving the backend, at least in front of the mainframe (or whatever is holding the real bank records).
And it seems this is rather common among bank clients, even among smaller banks and credit unions. On three bank sites I looked at recently, two explicitly stated that IE was necessary, and on the third it was implied.
I use IE 6.0 on Win2k box to access my bank's online banking site. No problems whatsoever.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
works with phoenix no browser hiding or anything funny. havent tried konq yet...
I use First Union. Using Mozilla on Win2k, it works just fine. I also like their interface - you can display a portion of your account statement based on date, and can click an icon that pops up a calander, click a date and it automagically gets filled into the textbox.
However, they're in a merger with Wachovia (sp?), and I dont know where things are headed.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
you sound like a bank.
ill email you
Credit Lyonnas is definitely a saint. They've had online banking for a number of years on the net, and although they recommend IE, their site works in netscape and opera with no problems.
OT: I think they've had some sort of online service for about 20 years or so through minitel....
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
Banks of course aren't the only sites which only support IE, but they certainly seem to be some of the most official and useful online sites.
This divergence of browser functionality is MS's way of really kicking every other browser builder off the map, but let's not forget that it was Netscape wich started this trend. Starting with html2, the standards were basically following Netscape's implimentations by 6 months
I don't know what browsers are "officially" supported, but I have no trouble doing my banking with Mozilla. For that matter, I also have no trouble accessing my Capital One credit cards using Mozilla.
yrs,
Ephemeriis
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
You can find a partial list of banks/cc companies and their Mozilla support here
I only care because I've been following the capitalone.com bug for months with no help whatsoever from them.. Oh well. The MBNA site for my Linux Fund card works fine. I'll be cancelling my capitalone card soon.
Isn't that an oxymoron?
I've been using online banking since the whole thing started... using the web for probably seven years, with SFNB (the first online bank, showing off S1's software), to RBC and now RBC/Centura. They've always listed such-and-such browser version requirements, and I've never had a problem using another browser before.
How many banks really *block* a given browser? And if they do, how many really wouldn't work if you masqueraded your user agent?
It sucks that these places don't officially support other browsers, but if anyone here has ever worked on an externally-facing web-based software package, you know that there is just so many combinations of things your QA department can test, and a good company will only say they support those, even if they know others would work. Its not responsible to say you support Mozilla if you've only ever tested Netscape 6, officially.
While in theory it would be great for banks to support everything out there, the reality is they just can't. They have to pick the biggest browsers and target their software for them. Imagine if they said they supported any browser available, how many different tech people would you need to sort through a problem? "Well, it works on IE, Netscape, and Opera, but Mozilla nd Konquere don't work, we need to figure out the problem and then rework the whole page." And they woudl also have to support user calls on every browser, which could also be a nightmare. This isn;t a generic website, this is banking information. They need to limit the possible ways things can break, which means they need to limit the software that can be used. If there is a problem discovered with Opera (for example) that suddenly means the information going to your browser isn't secure, people will blame the bank, not the browser. If your password gets hacked because Konquer (or IE, or whatever) does something wrong, people will hold the bank responsible, even if it's because they didn't upgrade their own browser.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
[/rant]
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
The only problem is that Mac IE5 is not supported for some reason. We have a lot of Macs at work, but PCs as well, so it's not insurmountable.
Bank of America works perfectly fine under Mozilla. Never had a problem.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I use the online banking of HSBC all the time, in mozilla and konqueror, with no problems at all. Well recommended.
How appropriate that an article such as this uses terms like "sinner" and "saint".
Only sombody with a religious mindset could "rationalize" something like this.
A bank is a business. Businesses want to make money. They make money by appealing to majorities. The majority of people use Internet Explorer, with a distant second being Netscape.
Now they are "sinners" for not supporting some browser that maybe a few thousand people use? 1/10th of a percent market share?
Give me a break.
Bank of America works great with Mozilla. Back when they were NationsBank, it took them a little while to support Moz, but their support for Netscape was fine until they caught up.
I wonder how many of the "sinner" banks use IIS? NationsBank uses Netcape/iPlanet so in that regard they haven't sold out to the dark side, yet. Does the server platform somehow reflect on their browser support??
Ahhh! This is the very cause of the problem! Why are they acting like IE is the "standard" and everything else is "alternative!" Is Ford standard, but Chevrolet alternative?
Another scary point is that these articles indicate that browser spoofing often works. This means that the only reason some of these sites don't work, is because they refuse to! There are no real incompatibilities
And I use Royal Bank.. their site supports everything I've tried. I was so amazed I sent their tech support an email about how great it was to be able to use Konqueror to do my banking.
Editors: Next time check that your shining examples aren't just fool's gold.
I'm getting more and more annoyed hearing about little tiny credit unions that work happily with Opera, Moz, and Phoenix while my monolithic, monopolistic (actually, in Canada it's more properly described as an oligopoly) behemoth of a bank won't recognize my browser.
On the plus side, kudos to ING Direct (the Canadian subsidiary of the European ING Group) for supporting Opera.
~Idarubicin
I have accounts with both Bank of America in California and their recent expansion on the east coast, in Maryland. In my experience they have always supported Netscape/Mozilla, ever since Netscape 4.79 and Mozilla 0.9. I have yet to find a feature that didn't work perfectly in my browser.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
I'm sure that the whole web-design firm will be fired because Janus will not get that highly-coveted $100 that you were about to invest. Now they won't be able to meet their quarterly results and hundreds will be laid off across our great nation.
The thing is, most of the bank require the browser to be IE, but you can still access them by changing the User-Agent. Most of the time, the site features are fully usable.
:)
Of course, this shows how stupid they are at blocking non-IE browsers, since it works well without it, but I think it's mostly a question of caring for the minority, because more than 90% of web users use IE.
What about geeks switching banks for one who do care for them ?
theefer
I bank with a small credit union and Galeon works fine with their pages, and the system's pretty fast. I prefer credit unions to big name banks when I can get them. They seem less inclined to screw you over anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Thanks for the post. My bank (First Union)got merged with Wachovia and I was a little worried about switching over.
First Union Has always worked great with Mozilla (actually, it looks even better in Moz or Galeon than Netscape 4 or IE), with one exception. Billpay uses a third party which is a subsidiary of CheckFree. I've called tech support to complain every month for the last three years, and CheckFree refuses to fix the problem. Go figure.
Bull.
Why should a bank have anything on their site that requires a specific browser? Its not a game site, its a bank. As long as they stick to some very simple rules, any browswer will work.
subject says it all. It really does.
Their site works fine with Galeon, Mozilla, and IE. I haven't tried Konqueror. Online banking in Canada is part of most account packages (there are no extra fees just for online banking). An online transaction is counted as a transaction towards your regularly allowed number of transactions (which could be unlimited if you keep a certain minimum).
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
My bank has given me no problems using Mozilla since 0.9.9.
Well here in Austria the Raiffeisen Bank had a few incompatibilities with Netscape 6 (when it came out) and Opera 5. I just called them, told them what it was and how to fix it and a week later the online banking thingy worked with all last generation browsers.
On the other side there are banks here that still use custom windows software with dial-in (cool for all Linux, Apple, DSL and Cable users/owners isn't it) or bet on Java Applets which of course only work in one browser be it Netscape or MSIE. Don't ask me how they manage to get applets working only on one platform and browser. Well i would switch bank if my online banking solution does not work for me - so switch and tell your bank why you switched, then things might change.
Tried it in Mozilla, opera, Pheonix, and IE. Works fine in all cases.
http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/
I've had no trouble with Mozilla and TD's Easyweb service. Pay bills, transfer money, etc. Nice clean layout too.
>Since when does the minority dictate how >those who must target the majority do business? Well, since they started making laws to ban discrimination. Disabled people are a minority, but there are lots of laws regulating how businesses should treat them.
Since when does the minority dictate how those who must target the majority do business?
I completely agree. Only last week I had to listen to the cheek of some idiot saying how I should have put a wheelchair ramp in so he could access my store! The week before that some black guy complained because I wouldnt serve him - it's my right isnt it?
I will second the endorsement of NetBank. I have used Mozilla for quite a while and have never had a problem with their site or services. They are great more generally in providing top notch service with no fees.
I've used the following companies at various points in the past (and a few I still use):
Fleet Bank/Credit Services: refused to let me log in using a non-Windows browser. I closed my accounts w/ them specifically because they wouldn't even respond to queries regarding compatiblity issues w/ their website.
MBNA: No problems using either Netscape 4.x or Mozilla for Linux. Didn't like the way they have bill payment setup on their website, but no problems accessing.
Citibank/AT&T Universal: They both use the same website (although you have to have separate login names). No problems using either Netscape 4.x or Mozilla for Linux.
Discover: No problems using either Netscape 4.x or Mozilla for Linux. They were the first credit card company that I ever came across to allow online account access & bill payment (Citibank wasn't far behind them).
redit Union (local, one branch college credit union that I still use): No problems using either Netscape 4.x or Mozilla for Linux. Mozilla occasionally has difficulties displaying the account history table (the first column will take up the entire width of the window, and the rest get crammed into tiny columns), reloading the page a few times will usually fix it.
In case you hadn't figured it out, these are all US based institutions.
Since about Mozilla 9.9, online banking at allfirst.com has worked quite well. All I do with it is to check my account balances and histories, and transfer money between checking and savings, so maybe there are some other features that don't work, but it's fine for me. You can download stuff in MS Excel format, CSV, PDF, etc.; it's pretty good.
Now, as far as banks go, Allfirst isn't the best in the world, but since I don't exactly have piles of money from my lowly freshmeat contractor and college newspaper jobs, it'll do for the present
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
...is not a saint or sinner, it is an arseh*l%.
Tat Tvam Asi
A while back I worked on the implementation of a few web banks based upon the Corillian web bank product called Voyager. It runs on IIS and has no browser restrictions really. Mostly it was the individual banks that put restrictions on the browsers because it was too expense to develop and test for small markets. There is no real incentive for banks to expand the range of supported browsers. Banks are interested in predictability, they don't want to be caught out by problems with an obscure browser that 0.01% of their customers use.
Developers and Web Sites should not have to support multiple browsers. They should support a single standard set of protocols and browsers should support those set of protocols.
A bank should not support a proprietary protocol, however all browsers should act the same when given a set of code.
I would argue that if a product wishes to be called a "browser" it needs to support various protocols and show that it supports them 100%.
For instance, the problem comes in that IE is more lenient towards bad HTML then Netscape is. Therefore IE does not support the protocol and by law should not be allowed to be called a "browser".
Mozilla for windows works ok, but Mozilla under FreeBSD does not! I even called customer care, but I am still waiting for a response. I gave them the user agent hoping they will include it in their systems.
Note: www.chevychasebank.com
Fabulous, Works with mozilla,
Great support, They even listen to their customers.
I sent in a bug report and they fixed the problem in about 2 months when they updated the website.
Adrian
My bank is Pentagon Federal Credit Union and I use Galeon with them for online banking successfully.
Slashdot should put the 'The Register' rdf feed on the frontpage instead of posting "stories" featuring articles from 'The Register'.
Never tried it before.
However, http://www.fortisbanking.be seems to work w/ Opera. I set it to identify as Mozilla just to make sure.
Fortis is a Belgian and Dutch bank...
- bram
I'm sure this is flamebait, but....
The problem is that there is an open set of standards out there that banks should be developing to- not specific browsers. Otherwise, there isn't any point in having standards, is there?
And yes, you can code to standards without killing cross-browser compatibility. I think the idea that you can't is one of the biggest myths of web development. It takes work, but then if you are a professional that should be your job.
Generally speaking, I think these sites come around through lazy or inexperienced developers who only know or are required to use a specific set of tools because it's 'cost-effective' and/or 'faster' instead of actually doing their job.
Whether it's the developers fault or management is up in the air- probably a little bit of both.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
Nice working with Mozilla and Citizens Bank of Canada. N6 worked with it too, but there was a warning that you had to "click OK rather than press "Enter"" Can't complain about that!
Non-nuclear, non-tobacco, non-military... its a good bank for and evil concept.
First Internet Bank supports Mozilla very, very well. This almost makes up for the fact that the first version of their software didn't support Mozilla or Netscape at all.
The fact that they can get changes made to their software fairly easily in response to customer complaints / suggestions is not terribly surprising considering that their software vendor, until recently, was run by their CEO and Chairman of the Board.
My experience with La Caixa is fine with Netscape 7 and Mozilla.
However, it seems that they are using some kind of script that it is not compatible with those browsers. For example, the transfer between accounts does not work.
Headquarters located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
URL: http://www.lacaixa.es
Overall, the site works just fine.
I have banking accounts in two different banks here (Bank of Montral and Desjardins), and I don't have any problems using Mozilla to access them (getting reports or paying bills).
My bank supports any browser with SSL capabilities. So I enjoy it. Teachers Credit Union... but I'm not a teacher.
Chevy Chase Bank in Maryland works with Mozilla, but I don't know if they especially tried to do that.
Banco do Brasil supports Mozilla/Netscape.
They have implemented a java based 'virtual keyboard' a while ago and this broke mozilla support. Then, when java 1.4 was out, every thing was back to normal. I could use on-line banking from anywhere again.
\m/
No, the way things will REALLY change is if:
- If the group of linux geeks grows to more than just a miniscule, fringe group
- Open source coders develop developer & platform tools as robust as those offered by the likes of Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, etc. Right now, nothing approaches these folks, and only a fool IT manager would literally "Bet the bank" on unaccountable, open source technologies.
Don't get me wrong, noncommercial open source is great, but it just doesn't make sense in some areas. There's no aggressive development cycle, and no real accountability.
I wish people would stop bitching about their obscure browsers not working with this or that...
but I can't say the same about quite a few .gov sites that I visit.
dgd
I completely agree. Only last week I had to listen to the cheek of some idiot saying how I should have put a wheelchair ramp in so he could access my store!
Apples/Oranges. You can install another browser or operating system or use a friend's computer to access your bank website if you need to. It's a feature, not a necessity.
However, the guy in the wheel chair can't borrow someone's legs to access your facility, which could be a necessity (depending on what your facility is).
"And like that
They have a right to not support anything but Internet Explorer, but we have the same right to know about it when making a choice of whether to use their bank. If they don't support a browser I can actually use I'd say I have a right to make an informed choice to instead use one of their competitors who can.
Everything will be taken away from you.
ASB Bank was the first bank in New Zealand to offer online banking, and with the amount of stuff you can do online there I seldom need to go to a branch. No, I don't work for them - I am just impressed with their service.
Suntrust.com the "official" bank of my University, does not support mozilla. Please everyone click on the link, then email them, as i have mailed them atleast 5 times, and never even revieved a 'sorry we dont support mozilla' back.
I haven't had much trouble using banking.wellsfargo.com from Konqueror (KDE2). I did have problems registering, but once its registered, it has worked so far. I had to register using IE. But Konq isn't on thier list of supported browsers either
But wouldn't it be better if instead of determining specific browsers if they had a list of supported technologies?
And they're a saint, not a sinner.
...in this particular cold and M$-friendly country we have one (thats 1) bank, who supports anything but PCs running Internet Explorer.
As a result, i have to run win95 on Virtual PC whenever i want to use my mac for paying the bills. I guess theres some ironic sense in that, but really it just pisses me off.
Since I do 95% of my banking online, and use Gentoo Linux on the desktop, it is an essential that my bank in Mozilla compatible. When I was a Bank One they changed some stuff which made their site non Mozilla compatible. I politely sent them an email and asked them to fix it. They did not. So I switched to Wells Fargo where now I enjoy Mozilla compatible online banking. Way to go Wells Fargo! (BTW: Bank One might have fixed this, since it was about 1 year ago.)
So far Scotiabank has supported my use of Opera (meaning it works fine), but each time I connect, I'm given a pop-up (in the background thanks to Opera's configurability) warning that IE or Netscape are required due to the need for 128 bit encryption, and in the future I may not be able to use my browser. Blah whatever. Nothing wrong with Opera's encryption. Incidentally, this is supposedly with Opera set to masquerade as IE.
DLJDirect -> CSFBDirect -> harrisdirect.com my broker...
If you can keep up with thier constant buyouts and name changing, they were always really responsive. I complained that their navbar had flaky javascript on it that was totally unnecessary, and in a week it was gone. Other than that, they always were very compatible with any browser I wanted to use, which is pretty nice considering it's a pretty complex online trading platform.
firstunion.com....
Sometimes good, sometimes bad... They change their code so often, it's a tossup as to whether your browser will make it past the signin screen. I've mostly had problems logging in, if I can get logged in, things usually work fine. One thing that is bad is if you don't set your browser to auto-accept all cookies, the site will constantly screw your session up, even if you manually accept the cookies. At least it used to. As I said, they change their code a lot.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
They are discriminating against mozilla.
Just go to BECU and see for yourself. We first found out about it when I tried it with konqueror. When I found out that they did not accept it, I fired them a email, asking them why they were accepting the browser produced by a convicted monopolist, but not from konqueror, which was produced by one of the organizations affiliated with what the convicted monopolist declared to be the enemy #1. A day later they started accepting konqueror, even tho' they never acknowledged that on their site.
I would send an email to my bank, if they did not accept my chosen browser..
There is another point to this issue also. With the new EULA, and forced updates, if your financial institution forces you to use IE, then it appears to me they and Microsoft may legally and financially become responsible/liable for whatever security compromising activity that may take place during transactions.
How does the Slashdot crowd find their banking support?
I find it very frustrating trying to do my online banking. In fact the only reason I keep a link to IE on my desktop is because my banks don't support Mozilla!. Of the two financial institutions I regularly attempt to work with online, zero of them allow me to use Mozilla. They are:
Now, BECU is scheduled to have a brand new site out sometime in November. I can only hope that they decide to support my browser.
It's just frustrating!
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
As soon as a French bank sees a non-IE browser on their web site, they shut the doors, run into the dark basement, and practice signing any "peace treaty" with a foreign browser.
The French are pathetic.
I have a problem with Washington Mutual: They'll fingerprint your mother. If you write a check to your mother and she goes to your bank to cash it, she'll have to give her thumbprint before they'll cash the check, even if it's your own branch and they can see that the money is right there.
The banks claim that the reason they do this is to reduce the number of bad checks they pass... even when the checks are from their own accounts and the account owner does not want them to fingerprint. The real reason in that case is that banks don't make any money by cashing checks, so they try to encourage people to cash checks elsewhere.
I switched to a very small local (to me) bank in Seattle because of this. They don't have online banking in any form other than wire transfers and direct deposit, but they don't thumbprint anybody either, and they don't have to bother with asking any of their customers to "opt out" of information sharing as required by law because they don't do information sharing. Their customers are opted out by default.
Before you sign up with a bank because of what it offers in the way of electronic banking, make sure you agree with their privacy and basic rights policies as well.
My bank (Washington Mutual) supports EVERYTHING that can handle SSL. I fired off a nice note to the webmaster - and it was appreciated. Pat the good people on the back now and then!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I want them to support standards like HTML, XHTML, CSS and so on.
Then the sites will work with any current or future client technology that also supports those standards.
Nowadays, there is no reason why your site should not be valid
Someone has already made a much better chart of how various Linux browsers do at various banks around the world. Check out the site.
The chart lists 302 banks in 32 countries and indicates whether someone has reported success with Netscape 4, Netscape 6/7, Mozilla, Galeon, Konquerer 2, Konqueror 3, Opera, and Elinks.
Help him fill in the chart if you have info on an unlisted bank or on a browser for a listed bank by e-mailing Evan
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
My school (MTSU: Middle Tennessee State University) has online services such as email, class add and drop, online scheduler, online directory, etc. The only problem is that they require IE or Netscape (4.x only). They do an exhaustive test on the browser, so changing the browser identity doesn't work. I'm sure this is not completely the fault of the MTSU ITD because the site is outsourced. That leads me to another concern.. why does some outside company have access to all my personal information?
I use citibank for my online banking and it works just fine with Mozilla. I'm not sure why The Register listed them as a sinner. Their interface is solid and intuitive as far as I'm concerned.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
MS is a goliath -- so was IBM when it introduced the PC. People didn't buy IBM machines, but what was important was that
they created a standard
which kept things from becoming a hardware tower-of-babble. And people in industries who don't know computers need a standard to begin with.
If everyone wasn't pulling in 42 different directions, not only with browsers but picture and sound formats and on and on, it'd be easier to support everything. Standards are made to be broken, but their upside is that they provide a common reference point to begin with.
And that is the moral of *that* story.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
My bank supports pretty much any browser, as long as it can handle an ssl connection. However, I know that csbc wasn't supporting mozilla about half a year ago, don't know how it is now (probably the same).
And really, there I can't see any reason why some browsers would not be allowed to use the online system. I mean I understand that they might design the site with IE in mind, but why not just say something like "Use whatever you like, that has ssl, but we won't offer technical support to anything but IE" and put one of those ugly "best viewed with Internet Explorer" banners?
Join the elite! Post at score:2! Ghostwheel is online.
I do my regular banking with 5/3rd Bank, and I have credit cards accounts I work with online with MBNA, Providian, Cross Country Bank, and Shell Oil. I know from regular usage that all of them work with IE, Mozilla, Opera, or Phoenix. Maybe I just got lucky :-)
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
they only pay a lousy 1% interest. I try to keep as little money as possible in my bank.
"The week before that some black guy complained because I wouldnt serve him - it's my right isnt it?"
I knew someone would bring that up. The difference between this and what browser you use is that your skin color or physical ability usually isn't your choice. Most people don't wake up one day and say "I think I will be disabled today" or "I think I will be a minority race today". You pretty much are or you aren't, and you can't usually change it easily.
The browser you use, on the other hand, is entirely your choice. You do have the ability to use Internet Explorer. (And none of this "I use Linux so I can't use IE" stuff... you chose to use Linux as well.) For the most part, when you switch to a different browser, you are aware that some sites will not work well with that browser.
I code my pages to the XHTML standard. I refuse to support Netscape 4.x because it does not support standards. My pages don't work on Mozilla 1.0 because of a bug in Mozilla 1.0's XHTML rendering. Does that mean I should break my layout because Mozilla 1.0 has a bug, considering Mozilla 1.0 is less than one percent of my readership?
The latest browser stats show that Netscape 4 has 1.2% of the market and that Mozilla 1.x has 0.8% of the market. This means that web developers need to spend more time working with the 94.9% of the population that uses Internet Explorer than the decided minority that uses another browser.
Let's face it -- all browsers have quirks. "Coding to standards" will not always solve the problem (as I mentioned above.) Thus, most web developers code for the 95% of their audience that is on IE first, and then choose to make sites compatible with minority browsers at their discretion. If you spend 50% of your development time working around bugs in Netscape 4.x (which has more market share than either Mozilla 1.x or Opera), is that an effective use of your time? If you "code to standards" and your site still doesn't work in Mozilla or Opera, is troubleshooting the problem an effective use of your time considering that those two browsers count for less than 2% of your audience? Like it or not, the answer is most often "No."
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Just my $.019999:
:)
Bank of America hasn't given me any problems, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla 1.1. I wouldn't necessarily say they are some wonderful bank -- they are a huge corporation and have all the associated pains, but at least they're not making me use Internet Exploder.
I refuse to use IE. If someone requires IE, they typically don't get my business and they usually get a nasty note as well. Same goes for sites that *require* flash, BTW. I only installed flash because of the games it lets me play.
Not apples/oranges ..
.. not elegant but ya its possible.
The disabled guy can ask a friend of his to sling him over his shoulder and carry him into the store so he can make his purchase
Appreciation for ebanka.com as they already supported some 0.9.x version of Mozilla when I asked them to update the no longer functional support for newer 0.9.x version. It was done in several days and their heavy JavaScript online banking app still works with latest Mozilla.
I am not so big client for them to have to take care of my complaint seriously.
Not serving a black guy classifies as racism.
Navy Federal Credit Union works fine with everything I have ever tried. IE, Kmeleon, Opera (Linux and Win), and whatever version of Mozilla/Netscape RH7.3 comes with and get this... Usable with Lynx on a console. The general bank information like rate calculators, online applications and some of the general info links did not work so well so its a little tricky getting to the account access part but, it works pretty good once logged in to my account. I have not tried the web bill paying portion with all of the browsers, which is handled 3rd party via Checkfree. I do know that Opera and the whatever RH 7.3 comes with but it works with that also. I tried to include some text from a Lynx section but I couldn't get past the lameness filter..
Multiple browser support CAN be done...
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
There's a difference between what's required by law and what would "be nice to have". Sure it's your right to use whatever web browser you want, but don't expect anyone to to start crying because you get an error in Konqueror.
The truth is that when a bank builds an online banking application and they start UAT testing, there will be no mention of Mozillas, Operas and Konquerors. You'll be lucky if it works in NS 4.72+ and IE 5.0.
You honestly think anyone is screaming in board meetings "Good heavens, our application doesn't work in Opera!"
The only reason why some of these applications work in Opera/Mozilla is just by chance that they emulate the popular web browsers.
Live web cams
6/10 to LloydsTSB.
I noticed this was under "The Almighty Buck." However The Register (theregister.co.uk, at least) caters to Europeans and in that list no banks that catered to Americans were listed. Change that to "The Almight Buck/Euro/Pound/etc."
By the way, DiscoverCard.com worked the whole time.
Oh, and my bank ehbt.com works fine. It's a third-party thing from fundsexpress.com FYI.
USAA has excellent browser support. I mailed them a few weeks ago about a rendering problem with Mozilla/Galeon, and it was fixed within a few days. The bug didn't even prohibit use of the site, it just made certain menus not work, so that navigation was more difficult.
Unfortunately, not everyone can become a member; see the URL for more information.
E*Trade bank's website works great in Mozilla. They also pay interest on checking accounts, reimburse you for ATM fees, refill your checks for free, and offer free online bill pay. (All the above requires a min. balance of $5000). Highly recommended!
You are missing the point: HTTP and HTML are completely platform independent standards, and it is very easy to "code" to those standards without additional cost. You appear to be assuming that a commercial web site cannot be built without javascript active server frontpage flash blink tag vibrating happy horseshit extensions, and you're wrong.
You're missing the point. The parent is pointing out that due to bugs and badly implemented features, some browsers are mutually exclusive. And when given the choice "90% of the market xor 10% of the market", the answer is obvious.
I do my online banking through Key Bank. It works fine with Mozilla, Netscape 6, and all the others just fine. I've never had a problem with them.
my bank, suntrust, is somewhere in between. it leans toward the saintly side because the entire actual online banking system works perfectly on mozilla, but their website itself gives a message saying that browsers of the netscape 6/mozilla family aren't supported (netscape 4.* is supported). i'm not sure why this is.
it seems to me that it would be easier to make the company's website compatible across the board than it would to do the same for the complex system for managing accounts. oh well. i'm a satisfied with it anyway.
"I just want to thank my coach Eric a.k.a. Disco for shattering my reality..."
Not only do they support Mozilla, they even support Konqueror.
... anyone who can press ^C and ^V thinks they're a web designer.
Of course it's possible to support different browsers; the ScotiaBank page is a very functional, customizable bunch of jsps, not some Flash-infested monstrosity written by someone who only knows how to run FrontPage. God, I hate FrontPage
There are two kinds of sysadmins: paranoids and losers. I'm both kinds.
Up here in the Great White French North (Quebec) the Caisse Populaires Dejardins (analogous to US S&L) have online banking that supports "officially" only IE and Netscape. In practice, however, Konqueror works fine with their services and they will take pains to make sure their system is accessible from any browser. A few weeks ago when they made some tweaks to their login procedure that broke Konqueror access, I emailed to complain and they were very nice telling me they'd look into it and see why it broke. Two days layer it was fixed. I'm not sure I'd call them saints, but they at least are aware that not everyone is mindlessly assimilated into the Collective. -- MG
As long as you have 128-bit encryption and some basic JavaScript capability then you are in good shape.
Clickety Click
Netscape 7 work at Americas Bank. Here's the uninformed part: I have trouble at Datek on-line brokerage, they only want to support IE (a cry of pain). I sent them an e-mail pointing out that America Online was going to switch to Netscape and they would lose half thier customers. It seems like an excellent threat. Any chance it's true? Ken
That reminds me of a joke that I heard today at the golf club:
For his sentencing, a black man shows up to court in t-shirt, sandals, shorts, and wearing a sombrero. The judge asks him: "Mister, why are you wearing that to my court?" The black guy then says: "Because you said I was going to Mexico?!" The judge then laughs and says "No, I told you, you're going to the can, coon."
I have 3 online bank/credit card accounts in the UK. 2 work perfectly well with mozilla (although one does pop up a dialog window stating that the browser is unsupported). The third refuses to work with mozilla. However, getting mozilla to pretend that it is IE6 makes the site work perfectly. I even phoned the customer support line once to ask why this is the case. They didn't have a clue abput what I was wittering on about.
I have one online credit union account in the US. That works perfectly with Mozilla. Unfortunately the service in the real branch is cronically bad. And, I had to pay for books of checks (sic) which I have no intention of ever using. And, the interest is paid at a rate so low that it might as well be zero. And they won't let me open a share dealing account because my credit history isn't good enough (!). Did I mention that I think that in the US, we banking consumers get totally screwed?
Now that I embedded the Apache web server into my mattress I found that I can do all of my banking online.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
we support MSIE and netscape 6.2. thats it. for some reason mozilla doesn't work on the PC platform. I would guess theres only so much you can do, but we dont even actively support a Macintosh machine with our newer online banking platform.
________________________________________________
I've been using Mozilla with Everbank since about 0.9.6 or so. They don't "officially" support it but it works fine for all of my on-line banking (EFT/bill pay, statement management, etc.). Great interest rates, too. If you're looking for an on-line bank, I highly recommend them.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I have a credit card from AMEX and a checking account at WAMU, both of their online banking solutions have absolutley no problems. AMEX is also nice in their ability to pay bills from a bank account without bothering to have any paper bills (you can tell them to stop sending you paper statements, but I still prefer to receive them).
The first time I used it, I had some weird issues (having to click 3 times to get one through), but since then it's been fine.
This is just nonsense. The only reason there are incompatibilities is because they're using non-standard, proprietary HTML extensions, and they rely too much on stuff like Javascript. If they'd just stick to standards-compliant HTML, they wouldn't have any of these problems. All platforms would be supported, and there would probably be fewer security problems.
Netscape 4 is teh sux0r.
They do functionality testing for IE (win32 & mac), Netscape (win32, mac, Linux), and Mozilla (including Linux). Works great. Even newer versions of Konqueror work there.
http://www.fnbomaha.com
Now if they'd just stop charging two bucks for using a non-FNBO ATM - the non-FNBO ATM already charges me $1 - $4, plus FNBO charges another $2 on top of that, complete scammage.
With Mozilla at least. www.amsouth.com has no problems at all.
There is a large difference between preventing people access to your store and allowing them to dictate how they access your store. Should I demand that my bank serve me in latin, because I choose to communicate in latin? No.
There is a large difference between preventing somebody from access your facilities and putting boudaries on how they access your facilities.
I refuse to net bank , seems to me my bank
(ScotiaBank) and most other banks in Canada
and I assume the US are spending vast sums
of money and time trieing to get me to help
them get rid of their employee's , don't get
me wrong I've got plenty of computers of all
shapes and sizes and have been "online" for
over ten years but to me there is some things
that computers do that can take away from our
society , the local friendly bank lady's will
cash any cheque I put in front of them without
even a look , because they know who I am , and
what else could they do for a living or what
future jobs will they attain because they had
a start as a teller in a bank , we need as many
jobs that pay any wages as can be had , that's
why the economy is such a mess all the money go's
in none comes out !
These banks will learn their lesson with the first ADA lawsuit. Some blind guy will sue them because he can't use the website because it doesn't work with his text reader.
German Banks support an online banking standard called HBCI. Since two weeks ago, GnuCash supports this protocol through the excellent OpenHBCI library. All you German /. readers out there, go get it! A stable release is scheduled for this December.
HBCI basically offers a NEW interface to online banking. No Web server, no Browser, no compatibility issues. HBCI (Home Banking Computer Interface) is a bank-independent standard that defines the communication between an arbitrary finance application and any arbitrary HBCI-capable bank server. Roughly half of the banks in Germany offer home banking access through HBCI. The OpenHBCI library enables programmers of finance applications to seamlessly integrate HBCI functionality into their programs, without having to know anything about HBCI details. HBCI business actions, like for example statement retrieval, bank transfer initiation or issuing of debit notes, can easily be invoked through very few lines of application program code.
cstim
The Bank of Montreal's website does not block browsers. They do offically recommend IE or NS, but they don't force anything. Most functions work all right in Opera 6, but anything that uses a popup doesn't work (no windows comes up, page goes blank). The way I see it, I usually only check my balance, so I would rather use the more secure Opera and lose a little bit of functionality than use IE and be hit by one of the numerous security flaws.
What I find ironic: after I log out, the bank site tells me to close all windows and clear cache, history, etc. In Opera, it's a simple File-->Delete Private Data-->OK. It takes about 5 steps to completely clear IE. When will they ever learn...
Their on line section has alway sworked for me in Mozilla, Netscape and Konqueror. I've never tried it in Opera -- not a big Opera fan.
Plus, I don't get charged to use ATM's owned by them and about a dozen other banks.
Every one was praising Wells Fargo, but until recently Iowa had a law on the books that made it illegal to charge for ATM usage. We could use our cards in any ATM in the state, no matter who owned them, with no charge. Wells Fargo sued to have the law repealed and won. So I'm not a big Wells Fargo fan.
I have used Mozilla, IE, Opera, and a few home brew variations on their site with no problems. They don't have a lot of client side scripting, and their site is even Text Friendly (Images off in Opera)
My bank here in Germany uses a secure Java applet (https and ssl) which runs perfectly in my Konqueror 3.0.4. It runs even better than in Mozilla, where there are some display glitches, due to some font issues.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
"Can you explain to me exactly which advanced functionality your bank need to use to make their site work that hasn't been there since HTML 1.0?"
Have you not read the HTML standards? HTML 1.0 didn't support anything but basic hyperlinking and the <PRE> tag. See here for more details. HTML 1.0 didn't support tables, forms, frames, etc. (Warning: Link is extremely dated.)
As I said earlier, I code my pages to the XHTML 1.0 standard. That means that Netscape 4.x won't render them properly, as Netscape 4 relies on a number of non-standard HTML tags and attributes (marginwidth, marginheight, height, etc.) In fact, Netscape 4 is so buggy when it comes to CSS that there are whole pages dedicated to its bugginess. (Search Google for more.)
Moral of the story: Code your pages to standards, and make sure they work in IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. Beyond that, it's up to each individual web developer.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
My boss closed his Suntrust account because servie at the branches was horrid.
What gets me about suntrust is this message.
From the page:
Your browser is not compatible with www.suntrust.com at this time.
If you are using Netscape 6.x, Netscape has chosen to alter their communication standards resulting in this incompatibility. In the interim, we recommend you use one of the following browsers:
* Netscape (4.08 - 4.77)
* Internet Explorer (4.0 or higher)
* AOL (4.0 or higher)
If you are using AOL or Internet Explorer 4.5 on a Macintosh, we recommend you download and utilize Internet Explorer 5.0 to optimize your experience on our site.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you have any questions, please contact us at 1-800-382-3232.
What exactly has netscape altered that messes with http? Nothing that I can think of. Sounds like an excuse to do shitty work. Probably how they explained it to the people who commisioned the webwork anyway.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Personally I don't complain, I just switch banks. There are plenty of banks eager for my business, and I have used online banking from several of them without problems.
As for losing "ridiculous amounts of functionality" I don't see what you mean. Online banking is pretty straightforward. I want to be able to see my transactions (a simple table), pay my bills online (a handful of simple forms), transfer funds (again, a handful of simple forms), and download my transactions into my accounting software. None of this is rocket science, and all of it can be done use bog-standard HTML and Javascript. My experience with most web pages that reject Galeon or Mozilla actually do work if you fudge your user agent.
I do remember a brief period when I had problems with Mozilla (and had to use IE), but that seems to be more because they are constantly tinkering with their online banking system rather than a plan to exclude a browser (the site is constantly being changed and for the most part improved).
Hey, the online banking site even runs on WebObjects from Apple, so I guess they believe in alternatives. *g*
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't User-Agent spoofing a clear cut violation of section 1201 of the DMCA. The developers of Konqueror/Opera are releasing (trafficing) software which includes the capability to circumvent a technological method (user agent checking) that effectively controls access (Only allowed with certain browsers) to a copyrighted work (Web sites clearly fall into this category). Other than some fringe testing or humor uses of agent spoofing, this primary use of this feature is to defeat just these sorts of browser checks.
I'd be really interested in hearing a lawyers opinion on this issue. I'd be even more interested in hearing if the KDE/Opera developers have even considered this question.
The Revolution. Now available as a convienent six tape series from PBS.
Does anyone know why newer mozilla (and galeon) will not let you set your useragent to start with Mozilla/4. It refuses to start, saying it should be version 5 or higher. My bank is one listed on that register list of sinners (NatWest), but by setting the UserAgent to be Mozilla/4 (blahblah, netscape 4) I got the netscape 4 version of the page and it all worked fine. Now I have to set the agent string to be IE to get in (because they know netscape 4 doesnt start with Mozilla/5), and the site is unusable in IE mode (which makes sense).
If people are going to be playing around with their user agent, they know that what they are doing is special in some way because it isnt an option on any menus, so I dont see any reason for not allowing you to say Mozilla/4.0
My bank, Nordea Finland, has an excellent online bankservice.
They've been online since the mid-eighties and know what they are doing. With everything from simple text-based browser to any of the newest browsers you can access all the same services ranging from simple money transfers to applying a loan online, not the mention broker and other stockmarket services.
And all these services are available even on your mobile phone without any extra fees!
Any examples of the "ridiclous" (sic) functionality to be lost by adhering to standards? Or what customers are demanding of banks?
It only takes one to make most people care, their own bank. Other people just don't like to see banks get taken advantage of by software vendors.
Yes I do know that. That's why there are published standards. If you can say that your site meets standards then all standards meeting browsers are supported. It's just that simple, and QA can sign off. Good companies work that way, officially. It's companies that don't work that way that will lose your money for you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I wasn't able to use Galeon with Citibank a couple months ago. But I called and complained, and now it works just fine.
And they say you can't fight city hall...
Unix: Where
CUA here in Oz has a webbanker, which has worked fine in Mozilla since about 0.9.6 or so. The site looks great, their javascript works, popup loan calculators work, and as far as I can see there's no browser restrictions enforced.
My only niggle is that when the java webbanker applet is downloaded it gives a TCP IO exception if it can't talk to it's server backend, rather than a human readable error dialog.
Boeing Employees Credit Union. They actually force you to a "Sorry, your browser is not compatible" page if you even try to access their main site (no signin, nothing that would require a password) with a browser that they don't approve of.
And, of course, they approve of MSIE. Ironically enough, they don't approve of all versions of Nutscape. I think they reject you if you try to use 4.76 or higher.
Oddly enough, I've had limited success using Opera, set up to reply as if it were MSIE 5.0. I get through the encrypted signin, but I have trouble getting the Javascript-based controls to work after that point.
Anyway, although I've asked them many times to work support in for alternative browsers, BECU claims they need to stick with where they are for "security reasons."
Meadow muffins! I think, like a goodly chunk of the rest of Boeing, they're just in bed with the Redmond Empire, and their site is written to Bill's Book of (Broken) Standards.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
My bank in Denmark BG Bank has its home banking based on ActiveX components which means that only browsers running on Windows based OS' work. I've tried vmware, wine the lot, but nothing works. Consequently I run home banking off my girlfriends laptop.
If it wasn't so expensive and bothersome I would have changed banks a long time ago.
How does the Slashdot crowd find their banking support?
Mommy, can I have five dollars?
The answer to the issue is quite simple: Banks list their recommended browsers to avoid headaches. Yes, Lynx with SSL support may work well enough, but who wants to go chasing down the an obscure bug that only affects 0.00001% of their users?
Personally, my credit union has no issue with what browser I use; they had a XHTML issue which I argued with the Mozilla people they should allow (because I thought XHTML was grey when it came to someone does <SELECT><OPTION ... />Option_Display</SELECT>), but this resolved itself when the credit union changed their HTML header. I used to be able to get into Ing Direct with Konqueror, although I am presently having issues with logins (I do not know if it is a Konqueror or ING bug; changing browser idents does not fix the issue). First Union/Wachovia historically has not given me issues, although I no longer have an account there. But all my personal banking can be done through Netscape for Linux without issues.
For an example of a system which dicates browsers strictly, I name the brokerage Scottrade. They say you can *only* use Internet Explorer or Netscape (but fortunately, do not name an operating system). Why do they do this? Well, if you read their terms of service, they specifically name a number of programs that you cannot use, which gather quotes, attempt to place stock trades automatically, etc. Here, there is a clear and valid danger should someone use a malicious client to do trades, etc.
While I have not asked, I'm certain that if you told a company like Scottrade that other *legitamite* web browsers existed, that they might allow them. I think many banks/brokerages/etc. just specify specific browsers because they [1] don't want people calling them about bugs while using XXXX (my transfer didn't go through, and browser Y said it did!) and [2] want the extra legal leg to stand on should someone attempt to compromise their system with an alternative Internet client. Of course, malicious clients can act like they are legitamite ones, but the more legal room the banks think they have, the better they feel about being online.
Wait!
You think banks don't care about college kids with only $1000 in the bank? Have you seen the deals they throw at them? Low interest rate credit cards, checking accounts with no fees at much lower minimum balances than non-students. On-campus ATMs.
Banks have much longer vision than your average startup. They know that your average college student will soon grow up to be a richer than average grown up. Banks want college business. If there's a reason for them not supporting other browsers, it's not because of the user base.
... is a client side language, theres not much they can do with it besides make pretty pictures.
"some browsers are mutually exclusive"
Sorry, but only when you insist on using certain features. Don't use them and you are OK.
It's trivial to make web pages that works for all browser - if you are a real web developer!
Sadly, there are so many wannabes who have not a clue...
Just saying it like it are.
These banks are simply following the law of "demand and supply" (in economics). When the demand for a product increases, the supply automatically increases. Currently more than 95% people use IE as their browser, whereas Mozilla is used by less than 1% of the people. So why will the banks waste their time and money on something whose demand is so low?
Washington Mutual (www.wamu.com) works great with Mozilla since v0.9.3 . Requires one cookie, iirc. No flash, no muss, no fuss.
Chock me up as one happy camper.
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
It seems that banks are getting the message that 10% or so of their clients are inconvinenced by IE only software. My bank now bosts a big long compatibiltiy table on their website. They might be tired of the constant rework required to make the average IE only site stay working. No one here would think that an IE 4.x only site would really work today do they?
Be nice and drop your bank a little letter when you run into this kind of thing. Let them know that you don't own M$ software and can't use their online banking feature. It's much like M$ Word forms, it's going to bother you just once but 10% or more of their potential online customers walking through their front door are going to bother them all day long. The whole point of putting these things up is to prevent that walkin and printed forms.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Naturally I think my credit union is a saint. I wrote their internet software. It was developed using Linux/Apache/PHP and Mozilla on Mac OS X is the browser I use myself. I made sure that the site even runs correctly with Lynx! :)
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
Often I've been in a situation where I hear "there are things other than IE?" and "I use IE, I don't care to think about anything else" from the people calling the shots as far as the specs & what will be paid for.
Then we have to go back to them with our site stats and say "are you willing to piss off X percent of users?" Luckily they wake up then. Lately, we've reversed the position - we tell them what browsers we're supporting, and why we cut off specific support for some browser versions where we do.
There are a lot of "Internet users" who don't have any concept of the Internet beyond IE, and even scarier, they're now the ones deciding how sites should be built.
It did not work in:
Some functionality was available without the menu - checking balances and getting a transaction history.
Then they ditched the Java menu in favor of plain HTML links.
Now it looks like they've switched back to Java, and Mozilla for Windows doesn't work anymore. I'm not gonna try logging on with Internet Explorer from work.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I almost never send out anything by mail except for b'day gifts.
.. pretty good eh ?
I use online banking heavily and my env. is Linux/KDE/Konqueror
Here is my experience:
Citibank - Very good for a long time. Recently they started throwing up
on konqueror. But I am confident it was a temp. problem.
American Express - Very good
Crestar Bank - Horrible Sinners. I moved to citibank basically due to this factor.
DCU (Digital Credit Union) - Cool, few months ago they boldly said they dont
support alt. browsers. But seems like Konq works fine now
So overall, 3 out of 4 of my banks
DO NOT PANIC
I've found several sites of late, including a bank, that refuse anything other than IE on the grounds that they don't have time to validate other browsers.
:-)
That's all well and good, but it turns out that most stuff works with non-IE browsers -- you just have to get the site to deliver the content to you.
With Mozilla, you can edit prefs.js to fool the site, with a line like this:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Wind
ows 98; DigExt)");
Works like a charm, and a surprisingly large number of supposedly IE-only sites start working fine.
It was on theregus.com, the US centric version of The Register, too.
In the UK their are certain laws that apply to all publicly accessible buildings, insisting that their facilites are accessible to everyone, including people with disabilites (hopefully that is the current politically correct terminology). An establishment can be fined if they are found to be breaching this rule.
I believe that the businesses that deliberately block access to browsers based on user-agent, are performing the same kind of discrimination in an electronic form, and I don't think they should be allowed to get away with it.
Whilst it is annoying to see pages that don't format correctly because some web designing monkey doesn't test his work in a variety of browsers, I find it totally unacceptable that they deliberatly block access to their site because of the user-agent.
I don't suppose there will ever be laws against this, but for now I'll just vote with my mouse, by not shopping/dealing with these people and making it known why I won't deal with them.
I was surprised to see one of my banks, ABN AMRO, listed as "no plans to support Opera". For those that don't know it, it is one of the bigger banks in the Netherlands, and it is not particularly know for getting electronic banking right.
I tried Galeon and regular Mozilla and found it just worked. No ActiveX crap, light (and more importantly: sensible) usage of JavaScript, and a really well thought out security model. They really seem to have had browser independance in mind when designing the software.
I'd be darn surprised if Opera doesn't just work.
Of course, The Reg is just a journalism site, so I can forgive them for not investigating it themselves, but still, this is not the right picture.
I even made a point of dropping my bank a note that they got it right, and should keep the team that built the site. I even got an answer from a sentient being on my comment!
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Well, look at it this way. Say a big nationwide bank decides to drop its clearance by 5" for drive up tellers on all new branches being built now and in the future. Well, problem is that there are a couple brands of big SUVs that will not fit under the clearance. Fortunately, those customers that own such vehicles only compromise about ~.5% of their customer base and the bank will save millions in construction costs every year. Sucks for those car owners. Guess they have to walk into the building with much shorter hours because they CHOSE to buy those big gas-guzzling SUVs.
I don't think so. People would go apeshit or for something like that or similar. Just because it is your choice doesn't necessarily make it any different.
Ditto here, had SFNB, they were great, but then RBC wanted outrageous fees, even charging me not only the now-extra monthly fee merely to have an account, but an extra monthly fee (I think $12 or so!) to pay bills online. I oculd not believe that they would charge me $12 to NOT write paper checks. Found Netbank and have been 90% happy ever since. I do wish they would send email status updates of received snail mail deposits (received, cleared).
Infuriate left and right
Of note, they were one of the first big corporations to use a java-based enterprise application server, using netscape enterprise, as you could figure out from the very telling AppLogic+FooAppLogic URLs. They upgraded a couple of years ago and I think they're using the upgraded iPlanet now.
Anyway. I am glad that my bank does not use a microsoft "solution" for any mission-critical application. That would make me *very* nervous to say the least. It looks like they've got some geeks who know their shit running their apps. Even the markup/front-end HTML/JavaScript throughout their site looks good to me (and i would know, i like to pick apart this kind of shit) while they've managed to keep the user interface fairly simple and intuitive.
Anyway. go bofa.
On an unrelated and fairly inconsequential note: i just refinanced my home loan and my lender is now bofa. i work for a fairly large corporation whose bank is bofa. my personal bank is bofa. so every two weeks, my company sends a direct deposit from their bofa account to my bofa checking account, a good chunk of which goes rite back to yet another bofa mortgage account. i'm bofa's bitch :o you'd think they'd give me free interest checking?
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
No problems so far using Mozilla and Opera on my banks.
For the most part my bank was working great in mozilla, but they introduced a way of viewing your checks online. Unfortunately this did not work under mozilla, so I emailed the tech support for the web page, and to my surprise a few weeks later, they had emailed me back and they had fixed it. I am very grateful for Huntington National Bank supporting mozilla.
Bigbiff http://www.exxtreme-linux.org
My current bank is the Halifax
:)
:) so I left them. I wrote them and told them why as well. They have lost the ~300 UKP a year they made from running my account.
(a figure half-remembered from a recentish survey about average profit per bank customer in the UK)
Their site is fast, HTML only as far as I can tell (little JS, NO Java, NO Flash etc) and it's bloody great. Works fine on Moz, Phoenix, Konq, NN4..and IE
They have to do a little more server-side than if it was some massive bloated 'application' that allowed you to, say, add a new regular payment_and_then add money to that payment_and_then_do_something_else_ (which is why so many of the others seem to do it so wrong, as they want to do it all so 'seamlessly client side') but hell... it just works
My previous bank was the Woolwich who, after years of not doing anything online, suddenly started closing branches, moving everything over the phone banking and Net banking. This is where the problem comes if your almost-essential-to-users-lives website doesn't work properly. I can't NOT use my bank's website, or only do my banking in work hours/ on a Windows machine.
ANything beyond the login page of their site, needless to say, was unusable on anything other than IE4 & 5 (not even IE6!) Terrible hierarchical menus in Java, JS used to calculate balances, show recent transactions, etc. Half the time I was staring at a screen that said 'you have a balance of "undefined call to variable bar...."'
The Woolwich didn't get it right AT ALL - I would call and report it as a fault, they'd panic, then eventually realise I wasn't running IE, and their support people would tell me all sorts of rubbish about 'Mozilla isn't secure' or 'Java is supposed to do that' (crash
A bank's website - or an ecommerce website - is different to, say, a whizz-bang movie release website that needs Flash, or a vanity site that asks for plugin foo - they have websites to keep customers, and allow them to save costs. If even the 2% of people quoted elsewhere in this thread can't use their service - hell, they'll just move.
End of story. IF you have a serious, customer facing website that you are relying on to help you cut costs and increase efficiency, it is NOT an option to restrict what software the site runs on. Just ask amazon.
http://milkshake.dexy.org
foreningssparbanken.se only supports ie, handelsbanken.se requires that you install a win only application to connect, nordea.se no good for mozilla, seb.se: could not even view their requirements in moz, skandia seems to work. 80% loosers
My banking experience under linux is mostly positive. Four banks worked fine, but one was a total stinker.
/mozilla.
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
President's Choice Financial - works fine with netscape/mozilla.
Disclaimer: AC because I work for one of the above banks.
I'm stunned the word "password" is even in the dictionary of a banking website designer.
I've got two banks. One, the Postbank, was a pioneer in electronic banking eons ago. Their first implementation used a dialup system with one time passwords (you get a printed sheet with codes, and you have to enter one per transaction). Read-only access to your data sits behind username and password (and both are enforced to be unrelated to your name or account number).
My other bank flailed for years, and required authentication that was strong but entirely unusable. They now have a system where you get a card reader, which requires you to insert your card; the reader does a local validation of your PIN code, when it matches, the device handles challenge/response keys.
The security of the latter device is as strong as the security of the embedded chip on the card. I'm pretty sure it can be broken given time and effort, but it sure as heck beats any system where the user has to dream up a password. At least, this system requires possession of your bank card, because hypothetical hacks on the card do require you to have the physical card in your possession.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
The Bank of Montréal's online banking has worked perfectly in netscape/mozilla (and friends) for years now. And Konqueror works perfectly with it too as of kde 2.0 iirc. But they pulled their WAP site which was rather disapointing, though they have said they might make a new rollout of an updated wap site next year.
I work for another online bank in Sweden - Handelsbanken. They (we) treat unknown browsers (Mozilla, Konqueror...) with a completely blank page.
And that's just at the public webservers - when you make a secure login you need a binary plugin which is only made in win32/MacOS versions.
I bank online with TD Canadtrust daily with Mozilla and it worked fine until tonight when I went through the process of ordering new cheques online. It involved alot of silly java applets and just didn't make mozilla too happy.
You can install another browser or operating system or use a friend's computer to access your bank website if you need to. It's a feature, not a necessity.
Why of course - I could go out and spend £150 on a copy of Windows XP, spend 3 hours installing everything and restoring my documents from backups! Or travel miles and irriate my friends each time I want to do online banking! What a sensible suggestion that is!
I'll tell you an easier solution shall I? I just won't do business with any organisation that refuses to stick to standards.
Just for the record, I've been using Mozilla with HSBC in the UK for the past 2 years, and have never had a problem with it - everything renders the same as in IE, and if anything, it's slightly faster than IE, although obviously thats down to the rendering code :)
If you go in the front door...www.suntrust.com their pages complain about NS 6 "has chossen to alter the communictaion standard...bla, bla" Not sure what they mean....but you can go right to their online banking site (different URL) and mozilla on Linux (and Win) works perfectly...although there isn't a ton of stuff you can do... Don't know what they are thinking...
My online banking with Wells Fargo worked just fine in Mozilla...as does my new account with Commercial Federal Bank. (they might be local to Denver, not sure)
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
I've tried with Netscape and Opera without success with two of the major banks in Norway; Postbanken and Sparebank1. Neither works properly, and they both recommend Internet Explorer.
The reason why it's not working is not because the browsers are lacking functionality, but because the developers are lazy and have been spoon-fed with Microsoft applications from day #1. Sadly, most programmers today are.
Each time I manually go to the bank to get a payment done, they ask me "Would you consider using our internet bank? It's much easier, and requires less effort." As you can figure, it's hard to explain to a casheer why I can't pay my bills over the Internet.
Hell, I'm the customer here, I shouldn't have to buy and install Microsoft Windows just to use their solution!
Well I use the Royal Bank of Canada and American Express and they not only both work great with Mozilla but RBC has one of the best online banking sites I have ever used, it even accesses my other accounts from other banks and gives me everything on one page!
ING Direct on the other hand has one of the worst web pages I've ever seen or used. It's like it was done by a preschooler with big huge orange buttons and dumb phrases at the top. It works with all browsers though so I guess I shouldn't complain.
-- iCEBaLM
Whoever complains about his bank online services not working with his browser is free to switch. And I really can't understand how they can successfully break compatibility with mozilla/konqueror which are working on uglysh and complicated sites. Banking is about numbers formatted in tables, CSS and some compliant JS will do it, as for my bank using IBM made software.
have you been defaced today?
Continuing my earlier post I checked citibank again
and looks like some monkey has made major changes to
the site and now it behaves erratically with konqueror.
Basically I have to create a new account everytime I want
to login !
DO NOT PANIC
Chevy Chase Bank is the largest bank in the DC and Maryland areas.
Now before they redesigned their site it would block any browser not identifying itself as IE or Netscape. I e-mailed them a couple of times but, this seems to be a policy decision as it did work if you spoofed.
Now with the redesign the site is even worse, as it has these iffy Javascript based menus etc. The old version worked with OmniWeb not so with this version (used to spoof to get in).
Now Mozilla works as does Netscape 7 and IE but, that is it.
Their reasoning when I e-mailed them was that other browsers weren't "secure" (their word).
Chevy Chase has always had iffy Mac support. In the old days they used a stand alone program for banking instead of the web and you could download the Windows version but, had to get the Mac version on a floppy. The Mac version was not a well designed app (to put it mildly).
Naturally, I'm not happy with them.
How many people would actually classify a money-grubbing organization such as many banks are as a saint? Except for managers, even bank employees often detest them (this coming from people I know, some family members, who have been employed by banks).
Somehow I don't think that having an netscape-compatible website is going to make many people switch to any bank in particular...
When I first joined UC their homepage didn't work with Moz - some bolloxy DHTML menus. I complained, and I assume others did too, and they fixed it when they redesigned their site.
However they just recently redid their online banking site which used to work fine, and now it doesn't work with Moz. I think it's because their menu JS file does browser detection and refuses to work with `non-supported browsers' whatever they are.
Whoever did the new site did a horrid job - goddam DHTML popup windows everywhere, then click for a DHTML menu, and each of those menu items has a rollover DHTML popup.
And I've seen those sorts of popups before, and I really hope its not the same developer, because he used to code using variables called Fred and Barney and Pebbles.
I've had great luck with First Tennessee.
I havent had any problem using the likes of Mozilla/Phoenix and Netscape.
Links even works fine as long as SSL and Javascript are compiled in.
-Dave
except you're not a retard.
Oh wait, you are...
I found this site a few days ago:
http://www.blue-labs.org/financial-shames.php .
Lots of good information on Banks and which browsers they support.
I haven't noticed any problems with Bank One. Though they do have some sort or proprietary software that plugs in with Micro$oft Money, the web page has everything you'd need.
After having worked there for a few years, I was very surprised how well chase supports all browsers. It is one of those instances where I can log on from any PC and use any browser to perform secure transactions.
Of course, I have a vanguard account that still irritates me. I can do everything BUT invest more money. Youd think they would make it a little easier to PUT money in there.
I use Nordea (Scandinavian bank) and it works fine with Mozilla/Linux even though they say you need Windows and it is not recommended for Netscape 6.
Their site is fine, unless you use Opera.
Every link at the top has "http://www.ptcu.com/#" as their URL, therefore doing no good to click on them. I have seen this problem on many sites using CSS.
I literally NEVER launch IE, except for their site. Really very annoying.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Westpac in Oz has always supported just about every browser I've thrown at them ;)
from AWeb to IBrowse right through to real browsers like Mozilla and wannabes such as IE
Banks are there to make money; if your bank is rejecting your browser then they're also rejecting your money.
Try: james.pcorp.com.au (remove the first dot)
When Mozilla 1.0 first came out some of the stuff on scottrade.com didn't work right (the Java streamer especially), but since then they've got everything working perfect.
I'm glad, I hate the idea of using something as insecure as IE to do anything important
Unless the customer specifies compatability, it is a priority only given lip service by management. Even worse, the other browsers are off the map.
JM
Oink, Oink!!
One of the largest banks in the mid-Atlantic, I've never had a problem with Chevy Chase Bank on just about any browser supporting Javascript. I generally turn off Java and Javascript, but I don't mind enabling it to do my online banking. (Aside, I wish Moz would let me selectively enable Javascript based on the domain.)
I'm not crazy about CC's redesigned site, but at least they didn't break Moz or Chimera support.
"Fleet Bank/Credit Services: refused to let me log in using a non-Windows browser."
I just tried logging into my Fleet Bank small business account using OS X and Chimera -- that's about as "non-Windows" as you can get. No problems, even though their site claims I shouldn't be able to do it.
Just FYI to anyone reading this thread -- check for yourself. YMMV
You break compatability by checking the http_user_agent string, and if it is not a correct browser, either deny access or even send it to a page to crash it (like with infinitely recursive frames). All banks I have seen do the former.
Spoofing your user_agent to get into websites that block browsers is illegal under the DMCA. The user_agent blocking system IS an access control device that restricts access to a copyrighted work. The copyrighted work of course is the website. The DMCA is about access control devices, not copy protection systems, though copy protection systems are access control devices.
Hmmm The wheelchair is superior to legs for moving about. I'll be a wheelchair user.
The NAB have come leaps and bounds from their initial offering (a Java based applet that, unfortunately wasn't platform independant) to a https (ssl) based solution that works reasonably well on just about any browser with decent JavaScript support. (OmniWeb notably does not work fantastically). I've tested with IE, Mozilla 1.0/1.1/1.2b, Chimera, Konqueror, Opera (just works), and a couple of others - doesn't work with Lynx though.
David de Groot Snr Systems Engineer
I have to either boot into windows (unlikely) or use Konquerer with set the user agent to IE 5.5, which then works with no problems so far.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
I use the Royal Bank's online banking here in Canada and have found no problems with it using both Galeon and Opera for at least a year now. On the other hand, my girlfriend has been having trouble using IE 5.5 with the Bank of Montreal's site for quite some time... she usually ends up using my box and using Galeon to view it. Go figure.
CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) had some issues for a long time and I was quick to blame it as being their fault. However, after many months, someone commented on the CIBC bug in Bugzilla that it was working in a newer version of Mozilla. So, as it turned out, it was actually a problem in Mozilla's SSL support, not in CIBC's site. Go figure.
And for everyone who is complaining that Mozilla can't change the useragent... Yes it can. You can either set the following pref in your prefs.js:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "fake agent string");
Or install the following toolbar widget thing to change it on the fly (very handy!):
UABar
Random and weird software I've written.
Here in Austrealia, the bank Westpac's online banking works in every single browser I throw at it. OmniWeb, Chimera, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, it doesn't matter. It seems they don't check what your browser is - they just let it work.
Sure, there's a few niggling issues (sometimes a lower scrollbar appears in a few browsers, and I need to scroll a little to the right), but all in all it works great with virtually anything. Hell, I even applied for a personal loan online without issue.
It's been enough to keep my loyal to a bank, and nobody likes banks...
Citibank has a history of flaking in and out with Mozilla on Linux and OSX in my experience, but with their latest revision it seems to play fairly nicely with Chimera, even via Junkbuster! The NYTimes site crashes Chimera more than Citibank does, but I just love its brushed metal skin..
BTW, you may want to install Junkbuster and fiddle with your useragent settings..
Are Credit Unions better? Both of mine have been great--OU FCU (forget the URI) explicitly supports all browsers with 128-bit or higher encryption, on any OS, and Commonwealth One shows you a scary warning indicating that it's not "officially" supported, but everything works great on every browser I've tried (including even the earliest Mozilla milestones on Linux).
Jouster
It's worked fine for me on Solaris and Linux for years, despite what The Register might say. Maybe they couldn't be arsed actually trying it.
About a year ago, I could not get CitiBank-CitiCorp-CitiGroup-CitiMortgage-CitiCongl omerate's site to function property with Opera 5. Wanting to inform them of this in a polite way, I tried in vain to find sometype of email address on their site. Nothing listed under contact us. The only way they offered to communicate with them was via pull-down menu list that only allowed choices such as "Checking Account" "Savings Account" etc....
So I did a whois on the particular citi-domain I was using and emailed the administrator contact. Told her that I'm sure she wasn't the person responsible for the site design, but could she please forward this on to whoever was. Darned if about 3 months later, out of the blue, I got a very polite reply from another citigroup employee who thanked me for the email forwarded to him and that they were working on better browser compability.
Someone else mentioned it, but politeness does count.
Mozilla, Opera, Netscape 6 all work with HSBC.
After writing emails that mozilla and linux was not supported, their new layout now supports mozilla on linux just fine. I am also able to log into US Bank. Kudos to them.
that's York County Federal Credit Union ... tiny little CU back in my hometown in Maine, but they've got really cool online banking software that runs great in mozilla, konq, ie, etc ... my only problem is that sometimes the toolbar renders strangely in mozilla, and i have to force the frame to scroll down to use it ... other than that it all works great ... it's one of the main reaons i've kept this bank, even though i now live in Boston ... well, that and its services are free :) ... and the home-town service blows the doors off of anything you'd get from Fleet ...
09
Your god sucks, asshat!
I have been a Wells Fargo Bank (WFB) customer for over 20 years. WFB has web-based online banking as well as banking via MSMoney and Quicken. WFB has been very good at supporting alternate browsers. I currently use Mozilla 1.01 on Win2K; WFB likes it well. I have also used Netscape 4.79 (when it was new) with WFB.
I believe the folks at Netscape/Mozilla have an in at WFB and make sure that their browsers are recognized and work with WFB.
It works for me.
www.nordea.dk
..hopefully sooner or later they will get tired of me calling on a weekly basis to ask when I can retire my ns4.7x browser.
a large bank with interests all over scandinavia.
I could use their netbank with mozilla1.0 and netscape at comparing version,and java2 for win32.
But when using my own fbsd box with mozilla1.0 and java2 I was denied access. I called their support saying they didn't support support linux - although he had heard it should work with netscape4.7x - yes it did.
but still, they seem to be of the belief that windows is safer than linux/fbsd because it is proprietary.
Time for a little story...Without going into to much detail, I had a problem with a transaction on my account (the merchant used an extremely non-intuitive chargeback code that I didn't realize), within an hour my administrator had gotten in touch with me, and gave me a contact with the disputed claims department, and within two days they had given me all the information on the charge. I couldn't get kind of response with a "real" bricks & mortar bank. Oh! And the site is beautiful, and comes up perfectly in my browser of choice: Mozilla. But don't take my word for it, check it out yourself: http://www.virtualbank.com
"I wish I had a Kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away." --Jack Handy
I have a Wells Fargo account, and while I quite like their online banking site, I have them squarely in the "Sinners" column when it comes to browser support. The problem is that their site accepts and rejects browsers based purely on browser strings, without regard to the brower's actual capabilities.
Since my favorite browser, iCab for Mac OS X, is neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer, I have to tweak it's browser string. When I do it connects with only a few glitches. Their denied browser page and browser test page essentailly claim that nothing except Internet Explorer and Netscape meet their "strict security standards." But what they actually enforce is a policy that only allows browsers that claim to be Netscape or Internet Explorer.
I have called the number they provide to point out this problem, but the person on the other end of the call clearly didn't think there was anything that she could do about the problem and told me that I'd be better of expressing my opinion on their Contact Us page.
Lastly, not having lots of web-authoring savvy, I found the following two pages extremely informative on the subjects of browser and object detection:
Browser Detection
Object Detection
I think this guy's main point is that browser detection should be used to make your page more compatible by altering subtle aspects of a page to cater to certain browsers' eccentricities (read "bugs") but it is often used (abused) to make pages less compatible by turning away the browsers the author thinks won't work. To actually detect a browsers capabilities, object detection should be used.
"No more rhymes now, I mean it!" "Anybody want a peanut?"
Just today I opened an account with Citibank India that me and my folks back home can access. Man that site sux. Doesn't work in anything but lame Netscrape 4.79, and Evil Explorer (I don't have winblows, so haven't actually tried it). The UI is horrible. I just put in a very nasty email to the webmaster and the suits about how their sux and violates practically every web standard that exists. It probably will get ignored, since the language is pretty rough, but I was feeling very frustated.
On the other hand, National City Bank of PA (http://www.nationalcity.com) has a very simple interface, no gimmicks, and works well on everything that I tried, might even do Lynx.
Jhaanti
I work for a bank, though I don't do their
Javascript (yet).
I think one of the big problems is that they try
to sniff the user-agent string... that is a
useless, they should sniff to see what
'standards' the browser supports...
DOMSupport = document.getElementById;
IEBrowser = document.all;
-Ironstorm
i have no problem with wamu's site using galeon. which of course is mozilla.
as for incompatibility, could it be that the servers are using IIS? if so, then I'd definitely switch.
netcraft returns wamu using solaris/Netscape-Enterprise server. so i guess that might have something to do with it.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Wachovia (First Union) supports Internet Distroyer & Netscape and are worthless in Mozilla.
Netbank and my credit union work fine with Mozilla 1.1
I think we have to draw the line somewhere.
Banking sites should right now be coded to support the following browsers:
Internet Explorer 5.0 and later (Windows and Mac)
Netscape Communicator 4.0 to 4.79 (Windows, Mac and Linux)
Mozilla 1.1 and later (Windows, Mac, and Linux, including the commercial Netscape 7.0 version)
Just these three browsers pretty much covers almost everybody on the Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.
Why these three browsers? IE has most of the users; Netscape Communicator 4.x has a huge base of legacy users; and Mozilla 1.1 and newer has become an emerging third de facto standard, especially since most of the latest commercial Linux distros include Mozilla 1.1.
Other programs like Opera and Konqueror have too small a user base and trying to trying to support beyond the three browsers I mentioned becomes a major webmaster maintainance nightmare.
I am forced to keep IE for Mac around because I can't get to my Amex bank account without it. Mozilla passes their "Your browser is ok" validate thing, but gives all sorts of weird problems like not loading pages.
they'll be the reason for the "incompatibility" and people will flock in droves to m$n. they danced with the devil, let them be the example. hell, they'll be bankrupt soon anyways.slashdot
and to think, where am i gonna get my drinkl coasters?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
My bank's website works perfectly using Konqueror or Mozilla. In fact, I think they don't do any check on the browser, which is good IMHO. How could a website know all browser names and versions that works with it ??
Ascencia Bank, www.ascenciabank.com, works great with every browser I've tried (Mozilla and Netscape). They also have great free checking, with interest. No ATM fees either.
Juniper Bank, www.juniper.com, works with Mozilla, and they also have a lower interest rate than Capital None. Soon as that card is paid off it's getting cancelled.
All my online banking via PFCU works for me in Mozilla (Windows & Linux). Site claims "optimized to work best with Microsoft Internet Explorer", but includes a Netscape icon. I'm guessing they need to encourage browsers that support reasonable encryption, and are choosing to keep it simple.
Note the dreaded browser detection code. Seems to pass Opera, Moz, IE & WebTV.
(indentations made ugly to pass Lameness Filter)I'm wondering if Credit Unions are more prone to pass the non-IE test because they have less $$ for flashy sites, and keep things simpler.
I am not aware of any NZ bank that fails to work with Mozilla. Victoria University's computer department works almost exclusively with NetBSD boxes running KDE3, and I have frequently accessed my National Bank account with Mozilla, none of my friends have problems with different banks either.
:)
Pitty NZ fees are high (compared to the UK), but since I have a tertiary account I have no fees
--sitharus
Most everything works with the newly merged First Union/Wachovia except Bill Pay with Mozilla. So, if you use GnuCash and want to pay bills online you are screwed. The rest of the interface, banking and one stop work OK but the fonts leave alot to be desired in both Opera and Mozilla.
Opera will work with Bill Pay most of the time when spoofing MSIE. Display gets distorted at times but at least it lets you in.
The entire letter I sent them is too long to post here, but suffice to say, I gave them an earful. It can be found in the appropriate bugzilla bug:
5 3
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=898
I've been free of Crapital One since June now, but I still haven't given up the crusade against them -- here is my Epinions review -- I encourage all of you to do the same:
http://www.epinions.com/content_78150143620
I don't understand why banks need to put browser checking code in their sites? Do banks depend on client-side technology to make their site work? If so, that is pretty sad! Something as important as doing online banking should have everything handled server-side. If the only reason banks are shutting out all browsers but IE/NS is because their site has to look "pretty", then that is really stupid! Somebody needs to bring this issue to the attention of the offending banks.
Meh.
Insufficient Funds for this First Post.
Your account will be Charged 30 Karma points.
Have a Nice day.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
I disagree with the liability argument. I don't think banks could be held liable unless they were just genuinely negligent in putting information out there that could be trivially compromised.
Where I do side with banks, though, is the fact that by "certifying" their site's functionality and security with browser XYZ, I as a customer can be reasonably confident that when I open up my account in a supported browser, I won't be able to do something stupid so as to compromise my account information, and the browser doesn't easily give that information up to someone it shouldn't.
Coding to standards is one thing, but not every "standards-following" browser is either reliable or entirely standards-compliant. If there are known issues or caveats, I appreciate the fact that my bank is making the effort to find those.
On the flip side, it might be a good idea on all sides if they still allowed me to access my information, but only by acknowledging the fact that MyBrowser/1.0 may be insecure or break.
...requires Explorer. I am going to contact customer support about this issue tomorrow.
I use Chase Online Banking with Mozilla on Linux and it works great. That's why I use Chase..(and I told them this)..I havent written a check in years and I'd like to keep it that way :)
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
I'd just like to say that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's "Netbank" has supported Mozilla for as long as I've been using Mozilla (since about 0.98). I was quite suprised the first time I tried it and it worked.
Works like a champ. And all you gotta do to get an account is join the Navy!
US Bank works with Mozilla 1.0 or 1.1 as long you you actually stay on US Bank's site.
My only complaint is as follows:
their outsourcer for reordering cheques doesn't support Mozilla, so I actually have to use the *gasp* telephone for that. But hey, I don't use that many cheques, so that is a pretty minor concern.
I will warn though that I could not get Konqueror to work at all with US Bank. For some reason, it always gets the error about having javascript not enabled despite the fact that javascript works just fine... I would assume that Galeon would work just fine.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
...PapaJohns.com online ordering doesn't work with Konqueror. Now THAT's a REAL problem.
I think you can spoof with more than general.useragent.override to really make it work. Do about:config. At around line 327 you'll see the useragent prefs. Particularily general.useragent.vendorSub. Set it to >5 if you want to get past Capitol One's sniffer.
The problem with the user-agent spoof is documented on bugzilla and hopefully it will be fixed soon.
But honestly, why should customers jump through hoops like this? Capitol One has been given every chance by you and customers like you. They don't deserve your money.
wells fargo seems to be o.k. for most better browsers (mozilla, chimera). was not a year ago.
never had a problem with the german postbank.
but: ups!!! they refuse even the newest mozilla etc. for opening / editing an account! i had to install ie (which i keep now on a disk image); only occasion in several months.
Sinner: Standard Bank South Africa once logged in under Mozilla/Galeon the interface is broken, and you can't access your accounts. Works fine under IE 4 and up, and on Netscape 4.79 (which I use to access it under Linux). I'm a recent convert to using Galeon, from vanilla Mozilla.
The only way to fly (through browser restrictions).
x t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/pn g,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,text/css,*/*;q=0.1
u serAgent)= "MSIE Microsoft Internet Explorer 99.99 Windows XP 2000 Win32 Win64"
User-Agent: Mozilla/8.0 (compatible; MatrixViewer 1.0; There is no spoon. )
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te
navigator.appVersion=99.99
navigator.(appName|
navigator.platform="Win32 Win64 Windows XP 2000 ME"
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Gotta love this "security" claim. George Carlin had this right in '99, when he said that Americans (and British, and most other peoples) are willing to trade their convenience and their rights for 'security'.
;)
Let's get this straight. They want IE, a browser *notorious* for the ability to be modified remotely without consent. Like the fucking Xupiter DLL I still haven't excised from my mom's system.. I had to re-install Windows to fix it. (I know that's the generic repair method. )
Contrast Mozilla, where you can prevent pop-ups, pop-unders, mindow resizing, or any other surreptitious content from getting through.
Hell, what about w3m, for God's sake!? That's my fav browser.. fast as hell and dog-ugly. Reminds me of myself.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Supports Mozilla and Konqueror perfectly. Don't know about Opera.
I bank at SouthTrust and at least up until a few months ago it didn't work all that well with Mozilla.
I've had similar issues with PC - so after talking with them, I have the following info:
Option 1: Keep your PC account, ask to 'increase' the amount they automatically clear. If you've got an account in good standing, getting your $200 changed to $500 can be done over the phone. I asked about higher than that and PC apparently does this automatically over time - I'm a fairly new account and mine was due to be upped. If your account has overdraft protection, you also have access to $400 overdraft (so $200 + 400, or in my case now $500 + $400 available for larger cheques).
Option 2: Find another bank that clears the full amount of your cheque immediately. Put your cheques in that account, then send a request to PC for a withdrawl from that account - from what I'm told, it work similar to a debit card purchase in that it is immediately cleared.
Other options: do a wire transfer between bank accounts (costs money, takes a little time), set up auto-deposited payroll cheques at PC, etc.
PC has been doing a great job keeping competitive and I'll gladly keep my business there. I've been using IE/Opera/Mozilla with their site and have no complaints.
Don't get me started. I can't believe the UK Bank Natwest has such a f*cked up online banking system. I've contacted them numerous times to ask them to contact Wells Fargo in the US for ideas on how to implemenet a light weight easy to use website, but the site keeps going from worse to worse.
I've never had (not even using IE on the Mac), a decent session. Thats even after breaking my brain trying to recall the 3 different passwords they require you to randomly pick digits from...
Morons.
didn't use to work with anything (even IE 5.05) couple of months back except IE 5.0, finally it works with 5.05 but haven't checked with netscape and from the response from their customer rep last time I don't think they care a lot for their customers as to what they have ... better get the browser they need or get lost !! In any case I have seen this mentality even with Bank of America which is the worst bank on this planet even worse than the government banks in china ... (yes! now u know how low level BOA is ... its actually a real boa (snake) with poisnous fangs ... I closed my accounts after suffering charges for everything and anything and a real painful customer service ... then who doesn't know about the BOA way of service ...
ok! that's about it ... I sound like a BOA frustrated soul but u just have to ask the dozens around u and they confirm all the facts about BOA ...
Funny you should mention it. I use both Postgirot Bank and Handelsbanken. Postgirot is usable with old Netscape 4.x (although ugly), but Handelsbanken just is of no use for me. I've had to send things through the mail and am just about to switch to a bank with a saner Internet policy. I've never quite understood why they insist on using that iD2 plugin either. A hardware key generator, like most other banks use, would offer better security.
Having moved £750 from my savings to my current account on Friday using one of the lab machines at uni (running Netscape on Solaris) I wonder where my money will turn up! I use Mozilla on my XP/linux box at home and that works just fine too. Very odd, if anyone finds an extra £750 in their bank account you know why =D
for what it's worth, I am using Phoenix 0.3 and it works just fine with Defcredit CU's system here in au and the Commonwealth Bank's NetBank system. I had trouble using Opera though.
"Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups" seen on someone's blog...
is NetBank and it works well in Mozilla and Konq. It's been a great bank to work with, especially when I live overseas and don't have a chance to go to the "local" teller.
That's the disadvantage of Wells Fargo, et al. There are some critical services that require you to go to some local branch. Netbank doesn't and everything is quite secure.
No, I don't work for them, just informing all what it's like for me.
--
Standards compliance is an issue not only concerning banks. Today the div shows up in the wrong place, tomorrow I'll only be able to access my bank account with M$ OS.
Mozillableness:
bad example: Globes IL
good example: WebFX
B.t.w, my bank's website works well under mozilla
girl
My bank Nordea is one of the biggest banks in the Nordic countries , and their web bank is quite good. They only say what standards your browser has to comply with, and really, that's how it should be. Then they keep download links for IE, Opera and Netscape. I called them up once with a Konqi problem and the person said "sorry, I don't have Konqi here, because where only running Linux on an old Pentium box for testing, and it's too slow for that, but I'll check when I get home." The server itself is written in Java, it wasn't clear to me if it is running on Tomcat, but I think so.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I emailed Smile a few weeks back and got this suspiciously form-like reply:
Thanks for the message. Unfortunately smile don't use Mozilla, as we find Internet Explorer and Netscape are the most common browsers used. I'm sorry if this is of inconvenience to you. However, I've passed your suggestion on to our Quality Review Team. Customer feedback is always valued and changes are made as a result of this.
Disappointing, because ebanking is one of the few applications that keep me tied to Windows/IE.
My girlfreind bitches and bitches about the lengths I go through to prevent spy ware. (I don't care if they want to watch what I do..., Why can't I just install it..., Don't you trust me, why can't my acount do everything yours can..., What do you need another browser for...)
But once she managed to install Xupiter, it was "Fix it, Fix it, FIX IT".
Actually if you hunt around on their website you'll find an uninstaller. That's no excuse for installing it the way they do, or not including the uninstall in the install, but you don't have to wipe windows to get rid of it.
I agree, full Kudos to Nationwide which I use quite happily with Mozilla and Konqueror on Linux. Try using Mac OS x (10.0.1) and the Default IE install won't ever let you past the login screen, no error messages appear, you just never get in to the site. Netscape 6 and Mozilla 1.0 both work fine on the Mac though, perhaps we should have a special category for sites which are more friendly to open source sites than closed browsers :-).
I have to take issue with their description of Abbey National as a sinner. I have been using it with Netscape and now Mozilla on Linux for well over a year and have never had any problems with it. Well, perhaps one problem, there does seem to be a bug which always renders the amount of money in my current account as a small or negative number, if they counld fix this I would recomment them even more strongly.
The Finnish bank Yhdyspankki/Merita/Nordea (dummy test account and an English UI available) has been and is a pioneer of online banking. Back when I got my online banking ID, we didn't use Web browsers. We used telnet!
The authentication system was devised to work with an eavesdroppable connection. Hence, the authentication works with a one-time pad of passwords.
Now telnet access has been discontinued, but the strong authentication system is still there. American banks are paranoid and fussy about browsers caching the password. Over here we just don't care, because the password is no good after it has been used once.
And the service works not only with Mozilla, Konq and Opera but with SSL-enabled versions of Links and Lynx, too!
And due to the extreme cluefulness of this bank, other Finnish banks have to imitate the cluefulness, too (though not always with full success).
The bank in Switzerland I use offers online banking by another way. The software is written in Java an does connect directly via 128bit ssl to the bank server. So you do all your transaction (bank transfers, trading, news and charts etc) in the java enviroment. No browser needed at all, as you can order the product via phone. If you want to order the product online, the site states that you need IE or Netscape (and JS plus Java), but I had no problem with Opera.
Sadly, due to restrictions by the US and UK government, this software cannot be sold to people with domicle in the UK and US.
I would be very surprised to learn that a bank had outsourced its web interface design. Banks had huge IT departments long before Al Gore "invented" the internet or Jeff Bezos "invented" one click shopping. Given the security and liability risks involved, I would imagine that 99% of the big banks do their development in-house.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Skandiabanken.no works like a charm with Opera. And I'm a happy online banker.
Vegard
You can't use the validator in automated test suites. I want some *Linux* based *command-line* tools. Where can I download it?
I can give you plenty of reasons. Any non-trivial web site has over 40 pages, many of which are automatically generated. You can't test *all* of them *all the time*.
You need a way to do automated testing (i.e. run all your static and dynamic web pages through a validator). It needs to be a command line tool and it needs to be open source so it is available in all platforms (including Linux).
No such tool exists. I'm surprised that it hasn't been mentioned on the Mozilla and Apache lists since both care about open standards and both have the power to do something about it.
You can't use the validator is you're required to log in to access certain pages. Even if you could give the validator your account information to log in, would you?
Also, this validator requires you to put your site live in order to validate it. There's no way I'm testing my site live. There's a Windows version of the validator, but I'm not buying a version that requires me to switch to Windows to do validation.
As was pointed out elsewhere, we need an independent open source command line w3 validator. With such a validator, you could make w3 validation a part of your unit test suite and avoid this problem.
So I switched to USAA. Got to be military or military-family, but if you are it's worth it. Excellent browser support, standards-compliant implementation, good security mechanisms, and generally easy to use. The time's I've had questions or comments (at one point a piece of their JavaScript didn't work in Mozilla), they took my information, and their tech people *actually called me back* to get more information about the problem. It was fixed shortly thereafter. Good folks.
Wells Fargo allows you to download your banking statement in csv format.
Its a start, but should work for GNUcash
It is less user friendly. They use cascading menus for their credit card website which only works for IE. For mozilla, only the top level menus show up; the users have to click on those and get to the leaf level by going through several pages (which, BTW, look really ugly as all they have is the links for the next menu level).
"There's no right, there's no wrong. There's only popular opinion." --Jeffrey Goines
I am a webmaster at a bank and worked closly with our online banking efforts. Last year we installed our in-house Online banking. The product/vendor that was chosen had the most crappiest code I have ever seen. We only support ie 5.5 or ns 4.6. Mainly due to the fact that all form validation is handled with javascript. I tryed the site with Opera and it could not even show the login page. It took 3 years to get this product installed due to changing specs and vendors dumping us on other vendors, so I dont see it being updated anytime soon.
The system barely limps along and they did the guy that runs the system barly know how it works because of the multiple vendors the server is a mess.We have no idea which or production files because each every thing is scattered and duplicated.
I use ABN-AMRO in the Netherlands with Mozilla and Konqueror. The sign up did not work but I gave them a call they s-mailed me the papers to sign. A few days later I got the token to login. The banking side runs perfectly under and standards compliant browser I have yet tried.
Maybe you live in interesting times
I use two different online banking services (www.chevychasebank.com and www.citibankonline.com). Chevy Chase works with any browser I've tried it with, but I had to set Konqueror to pretend to be IE to get past their check.
Citibank, which is on the sinners list, I've had absolutely no problem with. And I've been through two formats of the site.
The whole idea of requiring certain browsers is shitty though.
Re, TD Canada Trust web banking (EasyWeb)
Mozilla works in both Win & OS/2 configurations.
Opera (win 6.0x) works but won't remember settings between sessions. I have to keep typing in my account numbers because the 'onFocus()' method of the checkbox that remembers your account immediately calls 'blur()' and unfocuses the checkbox and prevents the cookies getting set.
-AD
HSBC in Canada does work with Opera and Mozilla
-AD
"Since when does the minority dictate how those who must target the majority do business?"
Since the disability laws require such sites to cater for the disabled minority
[sarcasm] ;)
so that's what the dmca is all about? i couldn't tell cuz it's so vague. i thought it had something to do with my drivers license or something. beats me. thanks!
[/sarcasm]
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
I have been pretty happy with Umbrellabank.com
Early on they had a javascript issues with pre 1.0 Mozilla; I emailed them and they fixed it in a reasonable time. I haven't had any problems for a long time (although they do not officially claim to support mozilla).
It's worked with every release of Mozilla for OS X from 1.0 on (discounting the bugs that Mo had with just about everything, of course).
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
But let us remember that nothing is air-tight
Yes, I know.
banks rely upon the good nature of their clients
I don't think so. For what it's worth, most banks in the Netherlands do not send checkbooks by e-mail anymore.
massive anti-fraud measures
Snicker. Those come into action long after the fraud has been committed. Dozens of teenagers have criminal records now because they assisted criminals in siphoning off money using stolen checks. The banks don't care; they absorb the losses in the unlikely even the customer can prove that the withdrawal was fraudulent, and start worrying only when national television starts camping outside their offices.
Banks over here realize that once criminals find a way to steal even small amounts of cash using electronic banking, users will lose trust in the system and will resort to more expensive ways of effecting funds transfers (which entail more risk, by the way, but the user perception is different).
Just an example of how petty thieves cause major headaches to banks: criminals would fish completed transfer forms from the banks mailbox, change the amount and the account number, and stuff the transfers back in the banks mailbox. No huge amounts of money were stolen, most of the fall guys were apprehended, but the customer response was such that almost all bank fronts were replaced to include fish proof mailboxes.
Sure, credit cards are less safe than Internet Banking, but the banks have a huge interest in securing Internet Banking and avoiding all security incidents, because the customers rack up huge costs which the banks can't recover if they fall back to paper funds transfers.
Plain text passwords are a disaster waiting to happen. Not just in the banking world.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I am forced to use Suntrust because the company I work for uses. I have complained many times to SunTrust but they don't bother changing things.
In the interest of full disclosure: I hate SunTrust.
The Spanish bank I use, La Caixa, now supports Mozilla/Phoenix, (though it didn't work until Mozilla 0.97)
ING direct Spain (http://www.ingdirect.es/) sort of works, but you can't make a transfer because there seems to be a bug in the javascript for that operation.
I have my wireless phone service with T-Mobile,
and their site is "incompatible with Netscape 6".
I went to Boston University, and their alumni site was (maybe still is... haven't checked in a while) "incompatible with Netscape 6. Grr....
WTF?
I can understand why certain proprietary extensions with IE & stuff don't work, but why the hell would a website work with 4.7 and not 6? I'm not trying to start a flame war here, but it seems strange to me.....
Capital One is one of the worst violators. Mozilla will not work even after changing the user agent. In fact, it appears they are just deliberately blocking Mozilla from working and refuse to stop. Here's the discussion of the bug at mozilla.org
On the internet, no one knows you're a frog.
I'd like to know where they got the info about LloydsTSB from, especially since they put them in the 'saint' category.
Generally, their site does work in most browsers, however from Mozilla 1.2a onwards, the site doesn't seem to work. You can log into online banking, click on an account, and be presented with the login screen. But all previous versions of Mozilla seem to work. I emailed them about this, and they said that they do no support any browser other than IE/Netscape, and have no plans to do otherwise.
Hardly saints, IMO.
You can't use the validator in automated test suites. I want some *Linux* based *command-line* tools. Where can I download it?
Perl and LWP could submit your source. I believe that you can use Perl from a Linux command line.
There are several standalone html validators; just do a Google.
The link I gave is good as the webmaster won't need to download anything to see the results. And it is from the oficial web standards people.
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
At least, I'm not having any trouble logging in... take a look!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I spent a hellish month in Birmingham working on part of the Lloyds TSB site. From a project management perspective, it was a nightmare. Technologically, it was one of the coolest projects I've ever worked on (lots of XML/XSLT). Seeing the Register write, "Clear winner and kudos goes to Lloyds TSB," it makes me feel that perhaps it was worth the stress, the bad coffee, the long hours, the skanky hotels, and the endless meetings, after all. It seems like what we built not only worked in the real world, it worked well.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I use TD Canada Trust and it supports it fine. Any browser that can support https and ssl. So I can use mozilla, ie, etc...
If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery.
But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine,
is somehow enobled and no-one dare criticise it.
-- Pierre Gallois
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