UK Banks NatWest and The Royal Bank of Scotland Now Support MozillaSaturday April 3rd, 2004Stuart wrote in to tell us that the UK bank NatWest have recently upgraded their online banking facilities, allowing Mozilla users to access the service for the first time. In addition, the digital banking features of NatWest's parent, The Royal Bank of Scotland, are also now compatible with Mozilla. See bug 66911 and bug 119134 for details. That's great news! Hope more sites adopt such a policy! That's one less tie for me to use Windows... Woo.. Thanks to whoever got that one sorted... I've been badgering NatWest for years on and off about it. YAY. Wow, that is *very* politely put indeed. More correct would be that they fixed the bugs in their web pages. That is great news and other companies are still to dumb or lazy to do even that. But there is no need to "support" Mozilla any more than any other modern standards-compliant browser: all one needs to do is get the code right. good news, but it has taken them long enough, perhaps they have used some of their £6.2bn profit <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3502091.stm> to employ a half decent web designer that can code to web standards I agree the wording is indeed a bit awkward, "...are also now compatible with Mozilla" implies that there is a need to use special Mozilla extensions or so... While it is just web standards doing their job. Nevertheless, it is great news for users of those services. My bank (Rabobank, NL) has recently started to put up a notice saying "sorry, it's possible that your browser won't display the Rabobanksite correctly", and the first time I saw it it really ticked me off :). However, fortunately they hadn't changed anything that would cause such a thing (at least not as far as I could see), because before that, and now still, at least the internet banking (the most advanced bit of code on the site, I'd say) still works more-or-less ok in Mozilla. I guess that's what they mean by 'incorrectly', but it still works. Basically the only problem is that when logged in, the initial page doesn't load very well. Oh, and I had trouble setting Rabo Alerts in Mozilla. Ahwell... *sigh* Hiring a competent coder seems difficult indeed. Such bad site code at banks (I have seen it far worse elsewhere, they basically just put something together by trial-and-error, it seemed) always makes me very pessimistic about how the bank's security is coded. ~Grauw Quote: Hiring a competent coder seems difficult indeed. Dunno why - all they've got to do is make their wishes known on any standards compliant mailing liat - subject to list restrictions - and they would attract loads. p.s. fortunately, you can bypass the Rabobank warning easily :). Nice to see Nat West finally being fixed, but I've always been with HSBC, whose Net banking service has worked fine in Mozilla. Now if only Camelot would take note and fix their official UK lottery site online games to work in any half-decent OS/browser - see the registration page at https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/player/registration.do - yep, they doubly block both the browser and the OS. I have phoned Camelot many times to complain about this over the last 2 years and like Nat West, they claim they have to test every approved combo and block all others they haven't test, which I think is ridiculous. It's even more crazy when ,like Nat West, if you fake your OS/Browser to be XP/IE6, Mozilla on Linux surfs the online games pages perfectly....it made me steaming mad enough to slap an Evangelism bug report into Bugzilla at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23523 Can't edit (or preview !) my posting (hmmmpph...), so that final Bugzilla URL was wrong - actually should be: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235239 NatWest's previous lack of support for Mozilla/Firefox is the primary reason I decided to not bank with them, I also contacted them about it and spoke to one of their staff at length about how he thought it was a problem on my end. For security reasons they were disabling browsers that weren't fit for their site, or so they thought. He wasn't technical at all, so whatever I tried to get across about web standards and browsers not being at fault I think went right over his head. For some reason I also think he thought I was using Netscape 4... Glad to read that they've finally woken up. :) Quoted: "For security reasons they were disabling browsers that weren't fit for their site". For security reasons I don't have any reason to use IE on the client side. I am a customer of Ulster Bank and it annoys me no end that their online banking doesn't work with Mozilla. In fact it doesn't work with *any* browser except IE on Windows and NS4.7 and it uses Java for no readily apparent reason. It really is a lousy service, especially compared to slick offerings such as Barclays. The most aggravating part is that I made an official offer as an Netscape employee (as I was at the time) by telephone and email to help them solve the issues. Did they get back to me or show any interest at all? Of course they didn't. Apparantly they don't care that a good % of their customers cannot even use the online services because of the draconian requirements. I believe Ulster Bank is owned by RBS so perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel. However, I'm ready to jump to another bank so I don't really care much anymore. I'll vote with my savings instead. Your browser does not appear to support JavaScript. To use NatWest OnLine Banking, you will require your browser to have JavaScript enabled. To find out how to configure your browser to use JavaScript, you should refer to your browser provider or read your browser's Help pages. To let anyone know who has new problems with this, NatWest have now changed their setup again. As I've detailed in bug 307525, they are blocking nightly builds. Currently, 1.0 to 1.0.7 all work, although I expect 1.5 will be supported when released. Spoof oyur UA to a supported version will get you in - the actual site works fine. Joseph Wright |