SEB, a Sweden based bank is now displaying warnings on its web app when opened in Firefox, recommending to switch to Chrome. Do they have any obligations to comply with web standards? Or is it just a question of competitiveness in the market?
If there are obligations, Firefox is such a fringe user agent these days that they can probably go without supporting it. The 3.8% of Swedes not using Chromium or Safari will fall off any serious compatibility requirements.
I doubt anything will break in Firefox, though. They just don’t want the burden of having to support a few hundred people when Firefox implements a feature slightly wrong/non-standard/not at all.
Just to be pedantic: we’ve had a hell of a time implementing dynamic resizing of svg’s in Firefox. Works fine with Chromium. We spent far too much development time to keep our 4% of users happy, but eventually we did it. Perhaps newer versions of Firefox changed this, but there are customer-facing oddities the bank’s customers may experience.
I’ve had similar issues with getting CSS tables to lay out properly in Chrome. Worked fine in IE/Edge/Firefox/WebKit but Chrome just randomly threw a fit and rearranged items for no reason, even the Javascript engine agreed with me that the tables should look like they were supposed to but they just didn’t when rendered.
My experience with SVGs in Firefox is that Firefox supports pretty much every basic features, but it expects the SVGs to be up to spec. As it turns out, a lot of SVGs on the web rely on quirks and side effects and you only find out they’re technically invalid when digging deep into the spec. Them behaving differently whether or not there’s an img tag around them also doesn’t help, and I’ve run into a few files using SVG features that only worked in some Adobe product and Chrome (only on desktop, IIRC) .
Getting browsers to work consistently still sucks, even when it’s not nearly as big a problem as it was fifteen years ago. I totally get why people don’t test for Firefox. We didn’t use to test for Safari for the very same reason; practically none of our end users used it and there are no usable cross platform browsers to test with even if they were, so we’d probably tell them to download Chrome anyway. Safari mostly worked well enough that if someone decided to pull out an iPad during demos it didn’t completely fail and that was food enough. Firefox only worked because devs preferred its superior web development tools.
I don’t think that there is an obligation with that kind of standard, no.
Banking and security, accessibility yes.
Specific choice of “user side software”, probably not. And it’s somewhat unlikely to happen too, because if you think about apps on phones, if suddenly a completely new phone OS were to show up and had 30% market share, it wouldn’t make sense to have a law that would legally require them to offer an app on that platform
And Chrome isn’t “officially bad” in a legal sense.
The internet standards themselves are a bit… imprecise too. Implementing them in browser is ultimately up to the companies, there is no legal body requiring a browser to have or not have features. They just usually sort of do the same things because going different paths would be stupid. Mostly. Sometimes they totally do that, though, e.g. calendars and contact info have a standard, but all implementations are a mess and transfer is a pain.
No laws otherwise orgs would have to support Internet Explorer even though it has been replaced with chromium edge.
If the bank can’t provide you with what you want, change banks.
If the bank can’t provide you with what you want, change banks.
While I agree, we both know the things are going… This won’t be an option at some point.
You gonna drink this verification can, boy, and you will greatly enjoy it!
-
As long as you have no individual contract with the bank that states otherwise,you are sadly out of luck. While banks must keep their service accessible, they can absolutely regulate how to access them as long it falls within reasoning.
-
There is a high likelihood that you can also use pure Chromium so you can at least stay off Google.
-
There has been a case in Germany when a bank changed it’s TAN process and customers didn’t want to change over to photoTAN/SMSTAN. It went through the court system and the highest federal court referred the case to the EU courts who afaik didn’t even accept it and did not see any problems. So it’s unlikely that there are any EU rules against it.
-
I think that there was a similar discussion around edge/IE and the result was the same.
Personally I would try a user agent switcher,if that doesn’t work chromium,if that does not work Chrome portable. The bank already knows everything and portable with a good firewall keeps google at bay.
-
