Financial sites only like IE?
by Brian Turner
Bloomberg has become the latest site in the financial sector which doesn’t like browsers outside of IE.
At present, any attempt to access Bloomberg.com in Mozilla Firefox 2 results in a blank white page.
It looks like this is probably due to the redirects for its advertising section not being compatible for Firefox.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this – there’s a high street bank in the UK that can’t process online application forms for savings accounts in Firefox.
It’s not the only time I’ve seen banks struggle with Firefox.
IE is a forgiving browser, but too forgiving.
Last year I had to contact your-move.co.uk after I found their meta tags weren’t closed, leading to a blank page in Firefox.
And until late August, the Financial Times website hated Opera. It seems the entire website was built on redirects for IE, Firefox and Safari.
Attempts to access FT.com would send the user to a completely different domain, which would display the news item, but no navigational system.
Luckily the FT has now fixed this issue – it even works in Google Chrome now.
But how often do we have to see major brands mess up because they can’t even be bothered to test they work in Firefox?
And why does it always seem to be the finance industry that cocks up like this?
Then again, Firefox compatibility could be the least of some developer problems.
ADDED 17/09/2008 9:30: The Fool sharedealing service is now having problems – I can login fine with IE, but guess what? That’s right – in Firefox I can’t login because the page is not redirecting properly.
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“IE is a forgiving browser, but too forgiving.” – I don’t see this as a bad thing. Poor development is poor development but perhaps this just proves that IE is better than Firefox? Hahahahaha… getting anyone to admit that however is a whole other issue!
I think the problem is when developers use Active X and similar controls exclusive to IE, forgetting that there are actually other browsers out there which don’t use Active X controls like IE. :)
The site works fine in my Flock browser which uses Firefox 2, sure its not a problem your end? Anyhow, if it persists, the IE Tab plugin is a quick alterantive than having to fire up IE
I contacted Bloomberg to get it fixed. :)