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

[Paul Wright]

On 08/09/05, Ian Park <ian at chalmers-park.name> wrote:
> 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...

The reason isn't because they use non-standard HTML, but because the
Money Manager is an ActiveX component that is downloaded and run
locally.  It then (after you give it the correct login details)
pretends to log into your other third party online banking sites and
screen scrapes them to pull all your account balances into the one
page.

Because of NatWest's absolute paranoia it's the only reliable way I
have of logining into my account without having all the details
written out in front of me.  And for that I find it worth firing up IE
on my secondary machine.

Obviously I'd be much happier if they did a cross-browser version but
I don't see anyway of doing that with current technologies without
maintaining two or more versions, basically one for each browser.  (If
anyone has any suggestions for how this could be accomplished I'd be
happy to hear them.)  As you mention, the egg site itself is entirely
workable with Firefox - it's just money manager that needs the ActiveX
part of IE.

I'm not part of egg but a happy customer.

Paul.