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Online Banking And Browser Support

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the my-credit-union-respects-mozilla dept.

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?"

3 of 598 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mozilla Credit Union by ender81b · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 .js file that would work for everything but, of course, they declined to use it.

    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.

  2. Re:Things will only change if... by Dolly_Llama · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  3. Re:Can't support everything by vidarh · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Thats just bullshit. My experience with various online banks is that the ones that are the most usable also work flawlessly across browsers. Why? Because they don't try to make their sites use all kind of fancy crap that just slow down and complicate things. When I log on to my online bank, I want to do one of checking my balance, looking at statements, or paying bills. Why would you need to use anything beyond basic HTML for that? Perhaps there are a few functions you want to use basic Javascript for, fine, but nothing that can't be trivially done so that it'll work even in Netscape 4, and nothing that should prevent the site from working with Javascript off.

    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?