Despite wide uptake of Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7, the Commonwealth bank still does not provide technical support to users of these browsers, or the latest operating systems from Apple and Microsoft on its NetBanking Web site.
According to Bryan Fitzgerald, general manager of media and communications for the Commonwealth Bank, its NetBank service "works fine for virtually all of our customers, including customers using Firefox, Safari and Vista."
A recent Netbank upgrade resulted in Firefox users having to contend with a fixed-width window that failed to accommodate some of the most basic NetBank functions.
Users said they had to either bookmark the login window and then open it in a new tab to avoid the non-resizable window, or suffer the annoyance of excessive scrolling to get around the display issues.
"A technical change was made to Netbank that caused a small number of problems regarding page display and printing," explains Fitzgerald.
"These were more related to particular customer browser and screen settings than to browser type or operating system," he said.
Whether the issues are user or browser specific, Netbank's recent upgrade failed to incorporate the latest versions of the most popular Web browsers into its technical support page.
Fitzgerald said that in cases where unusual settings have affected the display, the NetBank help desk is equipped to assist customers.
However, a customer who contacted Computerworld had encountered difficulties accessing Netbank with Firefox due to a cookie setting. Despite mentioning to support staff that he ran Firefox he was only offered support for IE 6.
A visit to the NetBank Web site reveals no support is provided for customers using Safari, Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer 7.
As of August 20, W3Counter statistics on global browser usage show that both versions of Firefox account for almost 25% of the market, while Internet Explorer 7 comes in at just under 20%.
IE 6 is still the current worldwide browser of choice, according toW3Counter it is used by 46% of the global market.