current accounts with online banking and NO TIMEOUT?

[auctions]

Smile is great to use once you've actually set it up, although I remember that was a pain. The timeout is fairly short, but the login info doesn't take long, and doesn't require the kind of bizarre passwords that no-one stands a chance of remembering that some banks use. We have online accounts with several banks, and Smile is by far the best in day to day use. Plus they don't try and make life difficult if you want to do anything at a branch or by phone.

If getting the info in at the initial setup stage is the problem, why not enter it for her? Otherwise, they'll have a telephone team to assist with the setup for people with special needs of various kinds, and being slow at typing could probably count!

A

[John Stumbles]

Partly because I don't see why she should have to disclose her personal security information to me, anymore than I would want to have to do to her.

I explained that it's partially due to her dyslexia and that I though they were, in effect, discriminating against her and others with that disability by requiring their users to be quick at typing - what about severely disabled people who have to type with mouth-operated pointers and such like? They were quite sniffy about how I was the only person who'd ever brought it up and they couldn't go around implementing every suggestion made by every customer (or in this case: non-, and not-to-be-, customer).

And that's the other reason I didn't want to apply for my SO: because I don't want to deal with an outfit that discriminates against her and doesn't (judging by the phone droid's attitude) give a toss about it.

Good, with money, my arse :-<

[dennis]

In theory they can't be read by anyone other than the site that put them there. There have been bugs which allowed them to be read by other sites.

[John Rumm]

I can understand your dissatisfaction with their response. However, for anyone forced to use this type of system, there is a "work around" that will keep you from being logged out:

Right click on a link on the site and select "open in new window" (or tab etc). Now follow your form link as normal and start filling, from time to time hit refresh on the other window to keep the session alive.

[Jonathan Bryce]

That sounds like a clear breach of the Disability Discrimination Act, so you should complain.

[PeterC]

I just use a single session in Opera, need to have cookies on, then when finished Sign Off, click on a toolbar button that runs Delete Private Data and all history, cookies, cache etc. are cleared and the browser closed. I might be paranoid - I'm the only user of this computer.

[Jonathan Bryce]

Unfortunately Barclays have by far the worst call centre staff of any bank I've phoned.

[Pedt]

In message , at

10:09:30 >

7 minutes before the popup and then a 60 second timeout before you are automatically logged out.

True enough. I've seen MSN Messenger installed for All Users and then set to automatic login. *That* was a work placement bod who, needless to say, did not get the IT job he was after.

Saw an open bank account once. Walked into a hotel lounge and spotted an unattended laptop that was logged into HSBC BIB and on the CHAPS payment page. Oops.

[John Stumbles]

The ironic thing in this case is that the banks are quite happy to have people using their systems from Windows machines, many of which are undoubtedly crawling with malware (not counting Windows itself ;-) and for all that the banks' T&Cs pages blather on about how you should be running antivirus s/w and so on) but here, at home, we're on a Debian Linux system, patched up to date, behind a (NAT) firewall, with separate user accounts set to lock (with password to unlock) after a few minutes' inactivity.

[John Stumbles]

Could've nicked the laptop ;-)

[Jonathan Bryce]

And it is only fairly recently that most banks' websites started working in anything other than Internet Explorer for Windows.

[Rod]

That might in general be so, I don't know, but I have always used Firefox (and previously, Mozilla) for the ones I use - HSBC and Alliance & Leicester. It was a matter of principle to not use IE.

[John Stumbles]

It's a matter of necessity, not principle here. I'm running Linux and I've never seen any version of IE that worked on any flavour of Unix (although when I was a software test engineer (in a previous life) there was one that was supposed to - but (surprise, surprise from Microsoft) it didn't).

[John Rumm]

I thought that there were a number ways of running IE under WINE on Linux?

(In fact I think MS used to actually do a version for Solaris and HP-UX at one point)

[PeterC]

Used Opera on Nationwide for about 5 years now.

[Rod]

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.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

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.

[Huge]

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...)

[Huge]

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.

[The Natural Philosopher]

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...