Random Developments

Read update on this post at the bottom

I do my day-to-day banking with HSBC (and I seem to be one of the few non-Asians doing so in Australia) because, to put it bluntly, it’s free: their basic transaction account has no monthly fee and no fee for transfers, and it allows a limited number of free withdrawals a month using other bank’s ATMs. And it even pays a decent (not great, but reasonable) interest rate on the balance. Adding to that, their online banking system works fairly well with any browser.

Or, at least, it used to. This weekend they unveiled a significant upgrade to their system, which had been announced for the last few weeks, and they seem very proud of it. Unfortunately, it only works in Internet Explorer. In Firefox, it simply does not work at all.

And it doesn’t fail gracefully, either. If you try to login using Firefox, after you type in your username and click on “continue” you get a blank screen. Nothing else. No error, no subtle failures, no garbage, not even a JavaScript error. And, because it manages to set a cookie before falling over, you can’t even go back: even trying to access the bank’s home page still gives you only a very blank screen (because it detects that you are in the process of logging in and tries to go forward with the process, I guess).

It would be bad enough if they had a legacy, old system that only worked in IE. But, in this day and age, to build a new application that does not work in other web browsers can’t be described as anything else other than laziness (or incompetence). Especially in Australia, which apparently leads the world in Firefox usage.

Perhaps it would be time to start shopping for a new bank. It’s a pity that there doesn’t seem to be that many no-fee options out there…

Update 02/05/2007: it now works perfectly well on Firefox. I’m not sure whether they fixed something, or whether the problems were actually caused by teething pains in the new system (of which they had more than a few). The e-mail I sent them about the problems received only an automated response. In any case, I’m happy now.

Ok, I give up. Does anyone know how to make an iPod show the date of podcasts in the dd/mm/yy (or yyyy) format without changing the language settings to something other than English? It seems to think that the only English is the US brand of the language, and that is very out of character for a company so concerned with good design as Apple…

In Australia, April Fools’ Day is almost over. In the US, it’s only just begun…

(and just in time for Gmail’s 3rd anniversary)