Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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/
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?
Banks have limits on how many teller assisted transactions one can do (usually per quarter or statement). Also, some people work during all bank hours (usually 9 to 5).
The internet may not be as secure as anyone would wish it to be, but it's still more secure than handling things in the branches. As a former teller, I can tell you that there are massive amounts of fraud that bank branches have to watch out for. With a good password your information should be safe.
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
They have to pick the biggest browsers and target their software for them.
You don't write web pages for browsers, you write web pages to standards.
It's not too hard, for inspiration, Wired News recently switched to full xhtml compliance with css. Their stuff works fine in any compliant browser.
People who complain about "I try to write to standards but all the browsers are broken", or "you can only do $feature on a certain browser" are lazy. That was a valid excuse 5 years ago, but not today. It is easier to write the stuff compliant to begin with than play around with stupid browser detection and NS4.x workarounds.
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
And if they do care about the browser, all logic would dictate that they shouldn't support IE, given the security track record IE has.
Fact is, this is entirely laziness and incompetence from the banks technical departments.
In the end though, the incompetent banks will lose out - I've already cancelled one bank account due to a ridiculously bad online bank (a 1.5MB java applet that required write access to your hard disk to write an encrypted profile that you needed to move around to any machine you wanted to access their bank from, which in itself made it useless to me, as the reason I use online banking is to be able to do my banking from anywhere I please - add to that that the applet had severe problems on anything but Windows...). While my account on it's own only accounted for a few hundred dollars a year in lost revenue for them, I'm sure I'm not the first and won't be the last they lose.
I don't think it's fair to place the blame entirely on "lazy developers".
As I see it, there are two possibilities when a bank site doesn't work with non-IE browsers:
1. The bank wanted a solution that would work with all browsers, but the developer cut corners and didn't provide it.
2. The bank didn't care.
For #2, I think it's safe to say the blame lies solely with the bank.
For #1, it seems the blame is largely with the developers. After all, the site's ability to work with all browsers was either explicitly stated, or it was implied. There's no reason an ordinary person would think "I want you to build my website" would be interpreted as "I want you to build a website that only some of my customers can use". Unless the developer explicitly states that their proposal is limited to IE, the expectation is (rightfully) that there is no such limitation.
At the same time, though, any organization contracting out such a significant job has a responsibility to exercise some due diligence. Especially a financial organization, due to the need for security. They ought to do enough research (either themselves, or hire a consultant) to know how to discriminate between competing bids. And they ought to ensure before accepting a bid that the developer truly understands their requirements, and that all requirements are in the contract. If they do all that, and the developer doesn't provide everything they said they would, that's breach of contract. If the bank doesn't do its due diligence, then it has to accept a share of the blame for having a half-assed website.
FWIW, Bank of America's site seems to work fine with Mozilla.