I like internet banking. It reduces all of my financial concerns down to a little window on my computer. I can pay my credit card bill whilst I’m waiting for a compile to finish. I can apply for a loan (should I wish to do so) in between debugging sound code. It almost makes banking a game – you click on buttons and type in numbers, and some numbers go up and other numbers go down – like Championship Manager, except without all that boring football stuff to distract you from the fact that it’s just an elaborate spreadsheet. Hooray for internet banking.
(what would be even better is if my parents used it too, so they could find out if that not insubstantial quantity of money I transferred over to their account the other day has turned up yet or not; they’re still of the mindset that anything more complicated than writing a cheque involves a trip to a branch – hell, they’re still of the mindset that uses cheques, come to that)
It’s great ’til you try using your standard browser (Opera) to do the internet banking, and then find that your chosen bank only use IE or Nutscrape 4.7 (they still haven’t upgraded to 6, let alone 7) and tell you that your browser isn’t secure enough to handle internet banking.
And IE is secure? *laughs*
IE is basically fine for SSL security stuff – it’s all the rest of the basic stuff it falls down on 🙂 If you know what you’re doing and the browser deals with https properly there shouldn’t be a problem using any browser, anyway.
But cheques are great! It means that it’s my birthday! Or Christmas. Um.
Yeah, I moved over to Opera a few short months back. It’s now my browser of choice. I still have to got back to IE <shudder> for net banking and a lot of online shopping. Why don’t more people support good standards complient browsers?!
I’ve done a pretty good job of bringing up my folks so they are pretty internet savey.
I do hate it though when people give me a cheque (I’ve sold stuff for a tenner on ebay and been sent a cheque). Then I actually have to walk into a bank which is like sooooo 1997