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Barclays Blocks Firefox

Tech site The INQUIRER mentions that Barclays says no to Firefox. Reporter confirms this is a problem. Relatively speaking, it’s a small percentage compared to American Express, who was a long time problem for many Firefox users. It seems financial institutions have long been a problem in terms of Firefox compatibility and web standards in general.

Personally I think most of the larger financial institutions have resolved their issues. It’s mainly just the handful of banks who don’t don’t invest much in their online infrastructure. Compared to how the landscape looked 2 years ago, I think there has been a lot of progress.

It’s also a major win for Linux and Mac users who are finding it easier to do finances without being hassled.

Were do people feel things stand these days? Has the landscape been improving? Do you still encounter issues? With whom?

12 replies on “Barclays Blocks Firefox”

It’s great to see less and less websites are Firefox-ignorant. However, may still need to figure out that Gecko is Gecko.

Anyway, I haven’t used online banking until now. But recently I signed up for both of my accounts. I think wether or not one is “supporting” Gecko/Firefox could be part of my decision which account to live with.

It is better than it was years ago, but I am still seeing lots of little apps mainly behind logins that only work right in IE. And then there is the barrage of enterprise web software from Microsoft that also only works fully in IE.

The largets Indian private bank by name ICICI does not support Firefox properly on its Insurance website. When I wrote to them about this problem they adviced to me that I should contact local tech admin for access to IE.

Have to write again to them :(.

When I was part of the Technical Evangelism group at Netscape, I dealt with a lot of banks (including Barclays).

Some banks were supportive back then (2002), but they would only roll out major changes very slowly so it could sometimes take years to get things fixed sometimes.

But most banks simply pointed at marketshare. Which of course has changed!

German/US banks actually were the quickest since Gecko had decent marketshare in those markets even back then.

For those in the US: Washington Mutual works flawlessly with Firefox and with Debian’s Iceweasel, without any complaint.

(They do use Flash for a couple of tutorial videos, which you can ignore without impacting actual use of online banking.)

I bank with Barclays, and have used firefox for many years for their online banking and main website, whether there are some minor parts of their website that are inaccessible I can’t say, but I think there is FUD being spread here.

Doron: My experience has been that’s the financial industry as a whole. Very slow with IT changes. Hopefully your work from back then will slowly trickle out 😉 .

I recall the Amex issue affected beta versions of Firefox 1.5 mostly due to changes in Gecko. I got my Amex card in Apr 2005 and their website worked fine in Firefox 1.0. The problem with 1.5 was fixed rather quickly once it was released. I guess the Amex web devs don’t follow gecko development too closely and when their site broke in a beta release they probably assumed it was a Firefox bug. If the Amex site wasn’t fixed quickly after the release of 1.5 I’d have cancelled my card as I don’t use Windows.

As for Barclays, the web site that’s denying Firefox is NOT their online banking site, it’s some online training site by a third party provider.

In Argentina, Online banking with Firefox is not perfect (CSS are broken more often than not), but it’s doable, at least with the 3 banks I do (or used to do) online banking.

I believe developing countries are more likely to have this kind of issues, since people are very “illiterate” when it comes to IT.

> Do you still encounter issues? With whom?
Citibank’s banking site shows an annoying warning page before letting me sign in, using Firefox on Linux. (Though there’s no such warning page using Firefox on Windows.)

URL: https://web.da-us.citibank.com
Summary: “You’re using a browser or operating system that can’t take advantage of all the features at citibank.com. For the best online experience, here’s what we recommend you use: …”

Wells Fargo is one of the banks in the US that has recently added support for Firefox. It would also be interesting to to build a list of Financial Institutions that now support Firefox and browsers other than IE. That list might be good to generate to get the lagging institutions moving. When they see their competitors providing this support there is business incentive to take action.

http://www.wellsfargo.com/help....._supported

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