[Techtalk] Mozilla v. Firefox

[Wim De Smet]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:25:37 -0800, Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> wrote:
> Carla Schroder writes:
>[snip]
> 
> > For example, if I had a sufficiently turbo-charged magic wand, I would
> > instantly make all online financial transactions not be possible with IE.
> > Mozilla, Firefox, Opera- nice cross-platform browsers. Lynx, Konqueror,
> > Galeon and other specialty browsers. Is it really possible to support all of
> > these, or does real life force you to specialize?
> 
> Basic HTML and forms would be enough for most financial
> transactions, perhaps with a little javascript thrown in to validate
> form fields before submitting (save the user a little time there).
> Why does a financial site need complex UI that's specific to a
> particular browser?

User authentication and traffic encryption. I think banks prefer
something stronger than "just" SSL to encrypt trafic with and
something more local to the specific user to allow them to access
their services. At least that's what my bank does. But that doesn't
make it problematic to support mozilla, you just support the two. I
doubt that any other webapps actually have a need for
java/activex/whatever.

The only problem I see with IE is that developers try something, they
test it in IE, and it seems to work after which they don't look any
further. If you set out from the onset to write something standards
compliant and test it in as many browsers as possible, you'll
definitely have something far more easy to port. Allthough ironically,
it may need tweaking to work in IE again.

> 
>[snip]

greets,
Wim