current accounts with online banking and NO TIMEOUT?

Understood. I was just taking one part of the issue - the browser.

Many (possibly including the ones I used) said they only supported IE. I have a feeling one warned me at some point, but I always managed in the end.

Barclays from the start of their online banking has worked here using RISC OS. I had an initial problem and got phone help - but it was just to do with using caps when entering my name. They were unusual in not just saying you must use IE or whatever. I suppose it's a rather plain looking site compared to some - but so what? It works - and that's the main thing.

There was a version of IE (and Outlook) that supposedly ran on Sun Solaris. I suspect it was produced for political reasons ("Look, we aren't a monopoly!") rather than technical ones, since it installed many hundreds of megabytes of compatibility libraries and when you ran it, it painted a window on the screen, then crashed.

(I only installed it to wind up my Windows Administrator...)

Actually, all you had to do was install the "User Agent Switcher" add-on for Firefox and get it to pretend to be IE. I've never come across an "IE only" website which doesn't work if you do that.

Well you haven't looked very hard.

I came across half a dozen.. the usual issue is javascript sites that HAVE to use javascript. IE javascript and everyone else's javascript are very different animals.

I am doing javascript design, and on at least 5 occasions stuff that works in Firefox doesn't work in IE7. I test on firefox so the other way is not a statistic I have.

One example was the interpretation of what was a string and what was a number.

i.e. '4'+'1'='41' whereas 4+1=5

The rules for 'when do I make this a string and when a number' are supposed to be tightly defined. There are grey areas though.

Likewise the stacking orders of layered elements is different: IE stacks with respect to the parent container. Firefox et al stack on an absolute basis. Z-index trumps other layering orders in firefox but not in IE7. Parent container trumps z-index in IE.

Also IE has a flat name space in the DOM..it doesn't matter whether its a form element name, a block element ID or indeed a javascript function! IE cant tell the difference if they have the same name. It also painfully slow traversing those names.

I could go on...

Any that rely on ActiveX controls go t*ts up in short order...

I've come across a few. If they use ActiveX or VBScript, they won't work elsewhere.

Yes, that was the version I meant. It didn't work. It was by Microsoft. Quel suprise ;-)

I've helped a number of people get online with Internet banking, and I'd have to say that Barclays is probably the best, and working with any browser is one aspect of this, but they haven't compromised any functionality to achieve that -- indeed quite the opposite - they are one of the most functional Internet banking interfaces.

I do remember seeing IE on Solaris once when I was at Uni. It was mostly as a curiosity; no-one actually used it for real as it was even worse than the default Netscape 4 (and that's saying something).

Pete

I quite like the TLC one too.

Pete

Ahh. Thank you. Never having used a Windows PC as my "personal computer", I am unfamiliar with such things.

There was a time (thankfully now receding) where many sites were targeted at IE only and hence used either HTML/Javascript that only rendered correctly on IE, or included technologies only present in IE (ActiveX, VB Script etc).

Quite a number of proprietary served application products are still like this, although as google have demonstrated with Docs etc, even these can be made cross platform.

Try parcelforce.com (ParcelFarce). R.

What about it? Works a treat in FF on Linux both natively and pretending to be IE7 on Vista.