[sclug] Banking site *Requires* use of Internet Exploiter

[Neil Haughton]

>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> [sclug] [OT] Banking site *Requires* use of Internet Exploiter
> From:
> Ian Park <ian at chalmers-park.name>
> Date:
> Thu, 08 Sep 2005 10:25:26 +0100
> To:
> sclug at sclug.org.uk
>
> To:
> sclug at sclug.org.uk
>
>
> I felt I had to get this one off my chest...
>
> This morning, I decided to give the Egg Money Manager a try (they're 
> offering a ?10 incentive to anyone who signs up to it...) - I already 
> have an Egg credit card and an Egg savings account. So far, I've had 
> no problem using Firefox to access the Egg web site, so you can 
> imagine my gobsmackedness (and annoyance) when I read:
>
> "Download Internet Explorer
>
>
> To install Egg Money Manager on this PC, you need a PC with Internet 
> Explorer 5.0 or above. This is because the software we give you to run 
> Egg Money Manager is 'browser based'. It should only take a few 
> minutes to download Internet Explorer, just select 'download' below."
>
> I have sent a very snotty secure message to Egg...


Pointless exercise. I did the same when they first introduced it - so 
that's two compaints they have had :-) . The answer I got is that they 
use ActiveX controls to do the screen scraping stuff that captures data 
from your non-Egg bank accounts. If you can suggest to them how they may 
do all this in a browser-neutral way, you may get somewhere (but 
probably not very far unless lots of people complain).

Personally I find the Money Manager stuff a pointless gimmick, but I 
guess I just have no imagination ;-)

A few months ago I had a similar beef with Scottish Power, Suppliers of 
Electric Power to the Gentry, who had a very nice (in a functional 
sense) website that was quite happy with Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror 
etc. Took meter readings, did account forecasts and everything. Then all 
of a sudden they introduced some whizzy software that blocks everything 
but IE on Windows. Even Konqeror's browser masquerading didn't fool it. 
I complained, pointing out that they had wantonly broken something that 
didn't need fixing in the first place, and got the usual Custard 
Services reply along the lines of "99.9999% recurring of our customers 
think IE is God, so we can't see what the problem is", or something like 
that.  They did however promise that a text-only version of their 
website qould be available 'real soon now'. I can't wait to see it, but 
it looks like I am going to have to because there's no sign of it yet.

Sigh...

Neil.