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?"
Good for yours, I found out my bank - a fairly large statewide bank - has iffy support across the board. While nearly everything can log in (as long as it supports 128 bit encryption which is a *Good Thing*) various functions don't work. I contacted the people about this and they said they would talk to the vendor soon about it. Well 6 months later I got tired of waiting and took a look at the code myself.
.js file that would work for everything but, of course, they declined to use it.
What was happening was they where using javascript for the pull down menu's that was only set to recognize MSIE 5/6 and Netscape 4/6. Note - this script would work in about everything I tested it in (opera, moz) but it was just set to only work if it detected those browser's strings. I sent them the fixed
Sigh. Not much I can do about it anymore - besides set opera to identify itself as MSIE 5.0 but that doesn't help with mozilla.
Forget the webmaster, write the suits a letter about how their site is out of W3 compliance, even better raise some IE security issues.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I currently use Barclays (UK), and their site demonstrate my point well. It works. It's reasonably fast (and when it isn't, it's because their system is overloaded, not because they're trying to push hundreds of kb's of crap to my browser), and it works flawlessly even with Lynx (thought their pages look like crap, since they don't use empty alt tags to hide all their pixel gifs...
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?
I did. It looks something like this.
Dear Sir / Madam,
An article published on The Register a few days ago (and available at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/27756.html ) prompted me to write to you regarding the browser support on your Online Banking service. A long-time Linux user browsing with Mozilla and a customer of your bank for a couple of years now, I am very frustrated by your lack of consideration in supporting alternative operating systems and web browsers. Supporting only one or two platforms for such an essential service as online banking shows short-sightedness and disregard for your customers.
There are various reasons why it is a bad idea to limit your support to certain web browsers or operating systems and instead use proprietory solutions. These include:
- Some people are unable to use certain technologies. The visually impaired, for example, may need special hardware and/or software to access the Web. Phone banking is not an acceptable alternative; everyone should have access to the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org) is working hard to achieve this goal by setting standards, so breaking them is inherently the wrong thing to do.
- The actual standards in place today are very secure and well designed, something which cannot be said about the proprietory extensions in most Microsoft products. Limiting your support to certain 'tested' browsers is by no means going to improve the security of your system; in fact, trying to improve security through using Microsoft products is an oxymoron and laughable at best.
- The method by which you are trying to limit access is useless but annoying. Most 'alternative' browsers allow the user to set their browser identification to anything they like, that is, the browser will present itself as, say, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0. Therefore, most knowledgeable users who are unable to access your site because of this limitation will change their browser identification and be permitted. However, this is a bad idea because (a) it will produce misleading browser statistics for you, (b) it lets anyone access your site tailored for a certain, non-standard-compliant browser, and (c) it may lead to situations where the user is allowed access but, because of the non-standard nature of your site, will not be able to navigate as intended.
I realise that Microsoft Internet Explorer is by far the most popular browser but there are many alternatives available. Ignoring these alternatives is utterly irresponsible of you, as well as bad business practice. Even if just ten per cent of people use the alternative browsers, that's ten per cent of potential customers to lose to your more considerate competitors.
The Register published a hall-of-fame as well as a hall-of-shame (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27777.html ). Of your competitors, Barclays, Lloyds TSB and Nationwide are among the considerate. I am sure I can find a bank which values its customers by providing the means to actually use their money. Unless I can see a considerable improvement in your support in this matter, I will be forced to change banks.
Sincerely,
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!