It requires Java. I can live with that, it’s a web application.

I had to call up to find out what browsers they offi­cially sup­ported, only to be told that sup­port was lim­ited to Inter­net Explorer on Win­dows, Mac (!!) and Netscape 7+ on both plat­forms. Fire­fox “hasn’t been tested”, Safari hasn’t been looked at. I’m not par­tic­u­larly keen on this, but hey, they’re a bank… we all expect them to be a bit backwards.

The appli­ca­tion sniffs for a Java Vir­tual Machine and refuses to load with­out even pro­vid­ing an error mes­sage if one isn’t detected. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that it checks explic­itly and exclu­sively for the Sun vir­tual machine… so any­one who doesn’t use that plat­form for what­ever rea­son (licens­ing, eth­i­cal, platform) — even if they have another fully com­pat­i­ble vir­tual machine — can’t get access.

My solu­tion? Dis­able Java (not JavaScript) alto­gether using the Web Developer’s tool­bar, then sign in (it doesn’t choke!), wait til you get to the main applet pane, re-enable Java, and press F5. Magic, it works.

There is absolutely no rea­son or excuse for this behav­iour. If this fits into some per­verted notion of secu­rity, I’m not com­fort­able hav­ing my money there. If it’s the prod­uct of an incom­pe­tent web team… well… they’re an incom­pe­tent web team. Grr.

I called up and asked why it wasn’t work­ing, then explic­itly asked for a report to be for­warded to the web team. Please lots of peo­ple do this (heh, you don’t even need to be with St George… they didn’t ask me for a name or account num­ber dur­ing the phone call!)… this ser­vice is unnec­ces­sar­ily stu­pid at present!

On a plus side, their phone ser­vice is good fun. I couldn’t find a sup­port num­ber quickly, so I called the drag­ondi­rect num­ber pro­vided on a let­ter (1300 30 10 20) and when none of the options matched “sup­port”, I just ham­mered “9” repeat­edly. Works on a lot of PBX sys­tems, and it worked there… I got through to a human within 30 sec­onds, who then put me straight into the queue for web sup­port. Good stuff.