Bank of America Web site problems with Safari, solutions

A handful of readers report that recent changes to the Bank of America Web site cause some problems with the latest release of Safari.

MacFixIt reader Jeffrey Ellis writes:

"Bank of America Online Banking has recently instituted a new 'SiteKey' policy for logging onto their site. This uses a combination image/word/passkey scheme, and does not fully work with Safari. What Mac users get when they try to login to their account is a blank page with a Bank of America header, instead of the SiteKey entry form. Apparently, this has do with a faulty bit of code in the site?s ability to deal with Macromedia ActiveX controls

Jeffrey later spoke with Bank of America technical support who offered the following two workarounds:

• After the Bank of America header loads, you get a Page Done report at the bottom of the Safari window (if you have View-->Status Bar selected). You should then simply wait, as the script which starts the SiteKey portion of the page is still running at the BofA site. On my machine it took an additional 30 seconds or so for further activity to be displayed, loading the SiteKey portion of the page. I was then able to enter my passkey.
• If that fails, there is the more extreme workaround of removing Macromedia?s Flash Player entirely, which Bank of America has found to work with 'everyone we've talked to'. See this Macromedia Tech Article with download instructions for various Mac versions of the Flash Player uninstaller. Quit Safari. Use the uninstaller to remove Flash Player from Safari. Restart Safari. The Bank of America site should now function properly.

If you are experiencing problems with the Bank of America Web site, please drop us a line at late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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