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Posted on January 05, 2003 @ 16:03 in Webdesign

The online banking website of my bank works best in Internet Explorer 5+. The site kind of works in Opera 6 and works okay, but looks a bit squashed together in Mozilla. Opera is my primary browser, Mozilla my back-up browser and I only fire up IE to access Movable Type (because it's the only browser that supports the text-area shortcuts) and to access the online banking site. This however doesn't send the right message to the bank: their access logs will not show that I would much rather use an other browser than IE to access their site. Lock-in, lock-out.

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  1. My bank's site absolutely will not work in Opera. Period. They're using a bunch of unnecessary JS/DHTML for navigation and ignoring Opera's needs in the process. I've sent 2 emails to them about it in the span of 6 months and plan to close my account with them once my line of credit is paid off. It's a shame, since they're such a fine bank, and I've been with them for almost 8 years.

    Posted by sasha on January 05, 2003 @ 17:43

  2. I've send my bank e-mail through their webbased support system, but have as of yet only received barely meaningful responses like, "Indeed, our website is optimized for IE, please use that browser." Ehm, yeah... that was what I was complaining about.

    I actually took the trouble to check out all the other major banks' websites, explore the demo-versions of their online banking systems with Opera (and check their Terms and Conditions of course), but I found no bank that up-front promises compatibility with W3C standards and/or non-IE browsers other than Netscape 4 (and what use is that?!). So for the moment I chose to stick with my current bank. Their website _does_ work with Mozilla after all, it just doesn't look quite as good as the IE version.

    Posted by Frank on January 07, 2003 @ 10:50

  3. Well, at least my credit card company's site http://www.directmerchantsbank.com/ is usable with Opera 6 (as long as cookies are enabled).

    Posted by sasha on January 09, 2003 @ 17:26

  4. I really like how Opera handles cookies. I think they were the first that allowed you to block all cookies or just accept session cookies _and_ keep a list of trusted domain-names that you want to allow to set and use cookies on your machine.

    Mozilla and IE6 have recently started to support this feature too, so that's improvement :-)

    Posted by Frank on January 12, 2003 @ 17:50

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