Online Banking And Browser Support 602
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?"
wamu (Score:1, Informative)
First Citizens supports alternatives.... (Score:2, Informative)
I hesitate to call any bank a Saint, but in at least this one regard, First Citizens are more Saint than Sinner.
Wells Fargo (Score:5, Informative)
Nationwide (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wells Fargo (Score:1, Informative)
Attribution of blame. (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:wamu (Score:5, Informative)
1) They block ICMP requests. Before I fixed my firewall (forcing the MTU), I couldn't get to the site.
2) Javascript that sets focus to the Username field *after* the page finishes loading (onLoad()). If you're already typing the password at this point, you look up, and just typed it (viewable) in the Username box.
Oh, make that 3 complaints:
3) It's far from realtime...
Other than these minor issues, I have never had a problem with any SSL-capable browser on any platform (even the HTML/CSS/tables all line up correctly).
---
I cancelled my Capital One card over their refusal to allow Mozilla. Spoofing the UA header doesn't work, as they obtain this via Javascript (which must be enabled). Moz doesn't (yet?) let you override the UA that javascript returns...
I've emailed Cap One many times, and even tried to explain to the Phone Monkey when I cancelled the card why I was cancelling. Unfortunately, this person understood none of what I was saying...
Of course I've also emailed Flipdog.com, VistaPrint.com, and other sites over issues like this. Pisses me off, and I do hope AOL one day ships a Gecko/Mozilla-based browser for this reason...
Things will only change if... (Score:5, Informative)
So get off your ass, knock up a form letter, keep it handy, and complain!
The future is partly in your hands.
Chase Manhattan (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Opera? (Score:4, Informative)
Capital One determines the browser using JavaScript, not the UA header. Unfortunately overriding the UA string does not override what JavaScript returns. And the site of course doesn't work at all w/o JS...
It was enough to cancel my card...
I'm Canadian (Score:3, Informative)
TD Canada Trust (Score:2, Informative)
TD bank (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Who cares what they say they support? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:These articles proliferate the problem (Score:1, Informative)
this article does not "proliferate" any problem.
IE is installed by default on 95% of computers sold today. IE is the only browser that most of the population even knows exists. It is the only browser that an overwhelming majority of the population use. It is a standard. just be cause you like it, doesn't mean that it's not the standard.
Opera is referred to as an alternative browser, because, (GASP!) it IS an alternative.
oh, and please don't turn this around into an argument on how IE got to be the browser installed on 95% of all computers. that's an entirely different can of worms.
Re:Wells Fargo (Score:3, Informative)
The only problem I've ever had with it involved an old version of Opera. I can't well describe what I saw, but it apparently was just a bug in Opera that was later fixed.
Banco do Brasil (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Wells Fargo (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Things will only change if... (Score:3, Informative)
harrisdirect.com (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:wamu (Score:1, Informative)
After using Mozilla for several months, suddenly I could no longer log on to Washington Mutual. I wrote customer support, and guess what? They wrote back that only 3 browsers are supported now: IE5.5, IE6, and Netscape 4.7
side note: (I shifted to Opera (which allows spoofing of your user agent) out of spite, but it, too stopped working soon. They likely switched to javascript-based user agent checking, which doesn't return your spoofed, but rather your actual user agent)
Amazing Linux Browser Banking Resource (Score:2, Informative)
Someone has already made a much better chart of how various Linux browsers do at various banks around the world. Check out the site [starnix.com].
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 [mailto]
RoyalBank (Score:2, Informative)
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?
Re:I love netbank (Score:3, Informative)
When I repatriated last year, retail banks didn't want my account due to a lack of banking history. NetBank was fast, efficient, and gives great rates.
My only complaint is that you cannot see deposit advices ahead of time, which is something my company does. Must be a batch system in the back for transaction history.
LloydsTSB (Score:2, Informative)
6/10 to LloydsTSB.
E*Trade (Score:2, Informative)
suntrust is somewhere in the middle toward saint.. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:I love netbank (Score:2, Informative)
my only complaint is that i get a little more spam from netbank than i would like. too many 'refinance you mortgage' or type emails. but other than that netbank is great.
Re:Things will only change if... (Score:1, Informative)
Won't help. IE 5.x & 6.x is viewed as being 95%+ of the market. Why would a business person, working hard to make a living, care about W3 compliance?
On the other hand, if open source can show how to cover 99% of the browser market by doing the same or (better yet) less work than it takes to make IE 5.x & IE 6.0 work, then those "suits" may listen...
HTML 1.0 didn't support tables, forms, etc. (Score:3, Informative)
Have you not read the HTML standards? HTML 1.0 didn't support anything but basic hyperlinking and the <PRE> tag. See here [ariadne.ac.uk] for more details. HTML 1.0 didn't support tables, forms, frames, etc. (Warning: Link is extremely dated.)
As I said earlier [slashdot.org], 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 [oc3.no] dedicated to its bugginess. (Search Google [google.com] 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.
Re:Wells Fargo (Score:3, Informative)
I think their browser check only goes so far as to look at the user-agent string instead of anything potentially more sophisticated. For sh*ts and grins, I tried logging in with Lynx (an SSL-enabled build, of course) one time. As I expected, they rejected it.
I tried this next:
That got around the browser check just fine...and the site was surprisingly navigable with Lynx, too. If you're using something other than IE/NS/Moz and you can set the user-agent string, try it out with your bank and see how it works.
Citibank Works Now (Score:2, Informative)
And they say you can't fight city hall...
Re:Opera? (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't really work. US Bank pulled a similar stunt with regard to their browsers. I had to use IE to get into my account, and that bothered me.
Here is what I did: I sent them a polite e-mail explaining that I work between Linux and Windows and the common browser (I use) between them is Opera. It is a well respected browser and I find it a bit painful to move to another browser just to use their site. They sent me an e-mail back saying they were getting a lot of requests like that and that they were looking into fixing it.
And they did. I can now use Opera at US Bank and all I get is a warning saying "this isn't a recommended browser, so it's yo fault." Heh.
So my advice to anybody who wants to contact their bank about this: Be polite. Don't make it sound like it's the end of the world. Don't make it sound like they're evil or stupid. Just politely explain your situation. You may or may not change any minds anywhere, but I guarantee you that if you get shitty with them you won't be heard.
You can always fool the site.. (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Amen! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who cares what they say they support? (Score:2, Informative)
The only bad thing is that if you install a new Mozilla and install PrefBar again, it overwrites your PrefBar settings. You need to find the prefbar.rdf file (that contains your customized settings) in your Mozilla profile folder and make a backup somewhere so you can copy it back after new installations.
Online Banking at Wells Fargo (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Just come to New Zealand :) (Score:2, Informative)
Pitty NZ fees are high (compared to the UK), but since I have a tertiary account I have no fees
Re:Opera? (Score:2, Informative)
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.0 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020326 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows MUSTDIE)");
Re:Mozilla Credit Union (Score:3, Informative)
I don't have a morgage yet, so the only important non-transfer transaction is the purchase of CD's for me. I generally do this from whoever has the best interest rate at the time of purchase, and don't worry about them till it's time to cash.
When I get a morgage I imagine I will set up an automatic bill pay in order to pay it off inside of 10 years or so, which would require no interaction from me after I set it up.
In short, being able to pay my credit card every few days from either banking account while rebalancing my checkbook does simplify the finances quite a bit, in fact I can't imagine doing them any other way again.