Why no OS X

I heard some banks won't let you access their accounts with OS X via the internet.



Why would this be? I have understood the internet to be a OS independent platform. I have been able to write cookies to OS X using IE and get secure connections.

it´s an excuse for that they are not able to make it work

if they talk about security and rely on cookies, you should not use their system at all.

my interpretation: default settings for the default browser on MacOS X don´t permit domain-independent cookies. they store a value in the cookie on http://your-bank.com and want to read it from https://your-bank.com. right?
this is the same issue with IE6 on windows. cross-domain cookies are disabled by default for the USER´s security, not theirs.
again, if they rely on cookies for security, their security is not worth a penny.

maybe you could try (in IE) to add their URLs to the "trusted hosts". then the cookies could work. maybe they just don´t care...

It's similar to some banks that only allow NS4 or IE4 and above. But if I set Opera to identify as IE, I have no problems logging in...

//NoXcuz

Thanks for the response! From what I know about web programming I could not understand why this would be other than a poor job of programming. Somehow though the I can't believe that large banks can't get competent ITs to write these sites, so it is my theory that Microsoft makes software deals with these companies to make their site MS friendly. The Banks would probably not go for it, except for the fact most people use MS and therefore it is little loss of business to them, but big savings in license agreements. This would just insure MS dominance. Why wouldn't MS do it if they could?

i´m a big fan of the MS-conspiracy theories

but there is another thing i can think of: at least here in germany banks only employ people with diploma. but 95% of them are very bad programmers and get stuck on reinstalling windows or even replacing a harddrive in their own pc...
- if people go to university for computer science, they are supposed to become "infomation managers" (making nice plans and time schedules and getting a lot of money for having no idea how things really work), not a programmer (which is more like handworks or creative work of an artist). these dudes learn a lot of nice theory. but web programming praxis is very far from theory... it´s all about experience.
- real programmers don´t go to lame universities when they are at that age, they superior any university courses and get bored too fast...

and this is also one of the big things that go totally wrong in our economy thus we go straight downhill now

Nicely put.