Balancing my check account

Posted Sep 24, 2005 5:51 UTC (Sat) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385)
In reply to: Balancing my check account by hingo
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

That could never happen to me, because no production cell phone on the market anywhere on the planet has 153 megabytes of free RAM to blow on my bank's Javascript login page, or the precise set of CSS and DOM bugs that Netscape 4.74 has.

(OK, the offending bank did actually fix their web site a year or two ago. But at the time the customer support people were quite belligerent about any failure of their site to work with any particular browser being my problem.)

This is one thing I haven't been able to figure out. I've used no less than five financial institutions over the years, and only one of them was accessible with w3m...until they "upgraded" their web site a year or two ago. There is no reason to use Javascript on a bank web page--the transactions and dialogs are more or less exactly what HTML forms were designed to do. I've seen bank sites that theoretically would work properly without Javascript and use no features not present in HTML forms from the RFC1860's, *except* that there is an explicit Javascript check on the back end.

Banking with w3m, while it lasted, was nice: I'm logged in and out and finished a bill payment in under 30 seconds, which is about the login page loading time of the Javascript banks...