Margin Note: Thoughts on why so many financial institutions are incompatible with Safari

Our friend Wil Shipley at the Omni Group (which develops the popular, KDE-based OmniWeb browser for Mac OS X) sent us some insight on why so many financial institutions claim - whether valid or not - incompatibility with Safari, or the Macintosh platform as a whole:

"My understanding of financial sites is that they are very conservative about what browsers they allow because they don't want, say, someone to use an off-brand browser and discover that the wacky browser has caused them to transfer all of their money to Guam. Now, I don't actually think that's an issue, but imagine you're a bank and 90% of your customers use one browser -- you might just say, 'We don't need the liability or burden of supporting multiple browsers.'"

"Unfortunately, if the bank is paranoid, they aren't going to simply fail to verify that their software works on other browsers, they are going to actively disallow you from using them, just because they are afraid of being sued if something goes horribly wrong."

What are your thoughts? Drop us a line at late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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