Cannot access bank site with Firefox

ActiveX. ActiveX is NOT supported by Mozilla Firefox. This is the reason you still need to use Internet Explorer for some websites.


Rick

Remove all the other Java versions besides the most recent, so 1.6.0_01 in this case. It shouldn't be a problem having the others installed, but a lot of things that shouldn't be a problem often are with Windows, so it's always good to eliminate unnecessary variables.

If that doesn't solve it, I would remove the Java 1.6, and reinstall the most recent 1.5 version. I haven't been following the development of "Java 6", but there were some changes made that may break poorly written applets, and sadly financial institutions are not known for being very forward thinking. The whole Y2K issue from a few years ago should be all the proof anyone needs.

If that doesn't work, you might try firing off an email or calling the bank's tech support to see if they have any thoughts. It's possible no one has reported the issue yet, and their developers were too lazy/incompetent to think to test things with Firefox, so they have no idea it's not working. Even if they are aware of it, the more people who complain, the more likely it will get bumped in priority to be fixed. And who knows, every now and then you get lucky, and your email is read by someone who actually knows what they're doing... Not just some poor sod who got maybe a weekend crash course before being turned loose.

I highly doubt it has anything to do with ActiveX. Most banks I've seen have moved to using server side stuff as much as possible. Much more secure and less error prone.

Try the IE tab add-on for Firefox. This add-on uses the IE engine in Firefox to render the pages that you tell it to. I use it at work because our online database doesn't work well with Firefox. It works great if you have one or two pages that you need to use IE to access, but don't want to have to launch IE every time you want to go to that one site. Google it or go to the Firefox add on site and search for it.