Linux Format forums

Nuke · Posted: Sun Nov 20, 2011 9:24 am Post subject: Nationwide's Web Site

Anyone else here use Nationwide Bldg Society?

They have just changed their on-line banking website, and broken it for me on Suse 11.4 running Firefox 3.6.18; I can log in, but FF crashes after a minute or two. However, on my other PC it seems OK on Ubuntu running Firefox 3.6.11

They have a list of "supported browsers" in which they say they support Firefox 8 on Windows, but specifically say they do not "support" anything on Linux.

I thought the days of websites depending on specific browsers was over. Looks like I shall switch my main finances to Lloyds.

heiowge · Posted: Sun Nov 20, 2011 10:11 am Post subject:

Perhaps an upgrade to a more current version of firefox may help. I'm currently using 7.0.1 under Linux Mint 11.
_________________
AMD PHENOM II X6, 14 GB DDR3, 500 GB hd, 1GB nVidia card, running Linux Mint 14 KDE / Win 7. Damn thing keeps breaking.

eeepc 1015PX, 1.66 Ghz Intel atom processor, 2 GB DDR3, 320 GB hd running Mint 14 MATE. Running great.

johnhudson · LXF regular Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:37 pm Posts: 767

I logged in with chromium without any problems and viewed it with Konqueror without any problems.

They have begun migrating it to HTML5 - in the same way as a lot of people have begun to do - by changing a number of elements and leaving others. So the charset is HTML5 but the stylesheets are not and they are not using Google's Javascript for IE yet.

I have already made suggestions in that direction.

PCNetSpec · Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 12:22 am Post subject:

You do realise that you *may* not be covered against online banking fraud by the Nationwide's "Internet Banking Promise" ?

Supported Browsers:-
http://www.nationwide.co.uk/internetbanking/helpandsupport/browserhelp.htm#tab3

johnhudson · LXF regular Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:37 pm Posts: 767

I doubt the promise would stand up in law if you could demonstrate that your computer was secure and they were using less inherently secure software.

In practice I've only ever used Linux to access the Nationwide website and I've never had any problem unlike customers of other banks. Their attention to security has also been better than many other companies' - but, as I pointed out above, I have been trying to persuade them to move over to FOSS because they trumpet the mutuality ethos which is of course the same ethos that animates FOSS.

Nuke · Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 11:32 am Post subject:

johnhudson · LXF regular Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:37 pm Posts: 767

I think the background to all these promises is that Nationwide signed up to some software which essentially creates a VPN from a Windows/Mac computer to their website and that all these promises are part of the contract they have made with the software provider.

I did contact them at the time to say that I assumed that the lack of such provision for Linux was because it was secure enough anyway - which they did not dispute!

ajgreeny · Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:54 am Post subject:

I have just tried connecting to the new NW website and managed to do so with no problems at all, other than the whole site being rather slow. This may be that my machine is now fairly old (about 5 -6 years old sempron2400+) but other than that it all worked well.

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 classic gnome desktop, but with firefox 8.0 installed from the stable firefox ppa repositories, which may make some difference; perhaps the regular FF from Ubuntu 10.04 repos is too early and will not work as well as FF 8.

It is amazing, however, that a large organisation like that is not aware of the extra security advantages of using Linux and open source applications and OSs. Who is it that advises them? Microsoft?
_________________
Ubuntu 10.04 user, and loving it!

pastychomper · Joined: Wed Apr 07, 2010 11:54 am Posts: 36

According to Netcraft, nationwide.co.uk (like most large company websites) runs on Linux, so I hope they're happy with its security. Cool

Even with an all-singing, gold-backed, guaranteed VPN I still think it's unwise to encourage people to use Windows for banking, but IANAB.

redbaron · Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2009 9:25 pm Posts: 2

Not sure and dont care what systems Nationwide use they accepted my registration using linux years ago and i have used a number of distros and versions of firefox over this time they have never mentioned i am using a non supported os or browser ...

I have never had any trouble accessing the banking page or any other page ...

EXCEPT ...it takes up to five minutes to load the page !

once there its works fine and had no security issues to date ....!

hope that helps...

johnhudson · LXF regular Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:37 pm Posts: 767

The long delay in loading is because they use at least four flash videos on the opening page. I put in a suggestion that they use an HTML5 compatible format and use flash only as a fallback.