looks like rendering adblockers extensions obsolete with manifest-v3 was not enough so now they try to implement DRM into the browser giving the ability to any website to refuse traffic to you if you don’t run a complaint browser ( cough…firefox )
here is an article in hacker news since i’m sure they can explain this to you better than i.
and also some github docs
I will happily stop visiting any website that demands I use an approved browser.
Well, those of us who care all say that but I for one have to access government and banking websites in several countries, if they implement this I have no choice. This abomination must be prevented in the first place.
You can use Chrome for those websites if they completely break, and Firefox for everything else.
Banks and government websites don’t tend to have adverts.
Do you require ad blockers with these? This use case sounds like the intention of the feature, not like the perversion we’re headed for now.
Agreed.
We can criticize the EU, but they would not allow or force people to install Chrome in order to access government web sites.
You won’t have a choice if it’s a bank or your job. This is the truly insidious thing, if enough important websites start demanding the standard, you might just end up forcing yourself off of the internet with that attitude
There would have to be very significant reasons for a bank to do that.
Like what? The only reason I’ve seen is laziness. Several banks in my area still require IE for some of their more elaborate online services. It’s typically limited to business users, but they’re still requiring it; to the point where they have a team of support agents that remote connect and reconfigure edge to run an IE-mode tab to the site, and install all their malware on your PC to make the service work. With the proper effort the whole thing could be reduced to little more than a chrome/firefox/opera/edge/safari/whatever extension…
But they don’t. because they’re lazy.
What Banks do this? USAA doesn’t, and that’s what I use.
I’ve zero issues swapping banks if needed.
On the consumer front, almost everything has a web interface layer over the grotesque monster that actually runs the services.
For any business accounts, banks are an entirely different monster. If you’ve only ever used consumer services, you’ll never know the disgusting mess underneath it all. Banks have only done this much for consumers because if they didn’t, they would have either lost, or never attracted any of the modern generations to their services, namely millennials, and all those who came after.
The older generation for the large part, is happy to continue using IE, and walking into a bank to do whatever they need to… But starting with millennials, having browser agnostic web based services to do simple things like bill payments, account to account transfers, balances and transaction records, and most don’t need much more than that.
One of the more recent, and possibly most egregious examples was a cheque scanner for a business, which was a USB attachment to a client’s workstation for bringing in payments in bulk, rapidly. Think about it like the mobile cheque deposit in your favorite banks app, but on steroids. The bank provided the cheque scanner, and a business login page for the service. The way it operated, from what I could see, is that it required special drivers from the bank for the device, and a series of custom ActiveX plugins, which, as expected, only work with IE. The entire process was essentially to take a high resolution scan of the cheque, and dump the image into the website (I presume, securely), to submit the payment to the bank. This process would be complete in a matter of seconds when it’s running correctly. From what I saw from what the bank technician did, remotely, was to load the site in edge, force it to display in an IE tab, then adjust the drivers and signing of ActiveX control to validate and submit the scans.
The mobile deposit does the same but much slower, potentially taking minutes to capture the cheques image and fill in all the details, per cheque. Meanwhile this process could literally process a dozen cheques in the same amount of time. What kills me is that mobile deposit is basically the same thing and they have the structure for it already. It should be relatively trivial to adapt the process to use the cheque scanner to submit the images of the cheque, compared to basically having to registry hack each client computer to work with the antiquated system instead; but they do it anyways.
I was asking for a list of Banks, not multiple paragraphs I’ve no interest in reading.
All of them.
USAA doesn’t not require that I use only Chrome.
Partly. Financial applications aren’t so easy to update for some valid reasons. No only do youave to implement the whole application on a new stack but also validate and extensively test them for flaws, things that have already been done on the ond application over many years.
Thats why some high end financial systems run on archaic architectures that needs to be emulated for lack of hardware.
Similarly for large enterprise applications that rely on decace old releases of OS and platform only performing security patches to mimimise breakages.
Its too simple to chalk it up as lazy.
So you’re taking your experience, with banks only local to you, and extending that as a blanket statement for all banks…
Please list all these banks near you that require IE?
I’m a totally separate person, and I can also verify that forcing business users to use IE for certain services is definitely a thing.
I’m not sure what your point is? It’s not necessarily going to apply to ALL banks, but it’ll probably apply to SOME of them, and that will suck if it happens to be your/my bank.
oh, I also want to point out that you completely ignored my question; you said “There would have to be very significant reasons” and I asked what that was, and instead of responding with a clarification on what is required as a reason for a bank to actually do the thing, you attacked my position asking for more clarity on which banks were actually doing this, I’m sure in an effort to minimize the scale at which my experience is relevant, yet other lemmings have already chimed in to say that they have also witnessed the same lazy behavior.
Classic misdirection. So, what justification is required for banks to actually innovate? The only thing I’ve seen from banks is them trying everything they can not to; so I’m genuinely curious what justification is required to actually make a bank do something.
I used to work at a credit union in IT. I can confirm financial institution laziness knows no bounds. Separate from their laziness is the vendor compatibility. I can’t count how many vendors do not update their software to run on modern browsers and relied on specific IE instances. Adding to all that is just the institution itself having decades old hardware and software because modernizing things can be incredibly expensive. The core my company used was incredibly outdated Unix and required a ton of different middleware just to make sure we were compliant where absolutely necessary. If it wasn’t necessary nothing got done. And that’s better than a lot of banks that could be running on some COBOL based core. Completely redoing the core will affect every middleware crap solution they’ve patchworked together to keep running over the past few decades and will be insanely resource, cost, and time intensive.
Even these days at my current company I run into this shit. Huntington bank requiring IE for check processing, or SAGE DB software requiring 2013 Access or else it won’t work. These are huge companies still utilizing outdated piles of garbage.
yes.
Time to find a new bank.
I’m self employed so I aint worried about that.
They don’t need everyone to comply, just the vast majority.
Which is why it’s important to encourage and educate as many about it as possible now.
I’m already locked in, I have to use google products daily for work as my work email and drive is all done through google. There’s no moving off that unless I leave my job and even then there’s no guarantee.
Fuck man, this blows.
… Until all the sites you absolutely need to use in order to *function in society *require approved devices with proper tracking.
So you fight it now by switching away from Google as much as you can.
That won’t help when you must use it for any online access to (for example) your bank, any loan application, school enrollment, car maintenance, online shopping, tax filing, airline tickets, passport renewal, license3 renewal, mortgage payment, etc., etc .
I will as well, unless it’s necessary for work/school, or to participate with the government, or not using it will isolate me from friends and family.
Google has close to absolute control of the internet, which is now an essential tool to participate in society. The amount of power they have is insane, it rivals governments.