Even after having lived in Taiwan for quite a while, I’m still surprised every now and again at the sad state of things. How can a country that is, quite possibly, the world leader in manufacturing computing technology, be so behind when it comes to computers?
Every foreigner knows how horribly antiquated and un-foreigner-friendly Taiwanese banks are. Today, however, I had the displeasure of finding out another horrible aspect of it. It all started when Miss Expatriate signed up for online banking with Bank of Taiwan so she could wire money back to her American account without going to the bank. Since we send money back every month, this seemed like a good deal. This past week, however, when she logged in, it simply wouldn’t let her do it. She tried a few more times until she finally called them today. Their answer? You can’t use Internet Explorer 8.
That’s right. The online banking system that allows you to wire money to other accounts doesn’t work with IE 8 (or Firefox or Safari for that matter). You can use IE 6 (and, as an aside, I absolutely detest IE 6 and would gladly slap the hell out of anyone that insists on using it. I’ve strongly considered blocking IE 6 users from this site.) and possibly IE 7, but they won’t support IE 8 until mid-July.
Now, I’m no stranger to this. Oddly enough, it seems to be a preoccupation with Taiwanese web designers to make apps run only with IE 6 and no other browsers. Even my school had a web app that didn’t work until I complained a bit and now it works on IE 8. But my questions is this: how is this even done?
After looking the site over, I found out that the online banking application was written in ASP.Net, the Microsoft coding language. This was shown by the link to the actual Online Banking Login.
So, this begs the question: how can a webapp written in a Microsoft Language not work in a Microsoft browser? I don’t know. I’m not a programmer. I can do HTML and CSS and I’m learning Javascript, but I know nothing of ASP.Net, Ruby, Perl, or other webapp development languages. Is this something that has to do with the age of the code? Is it a nuance of IE8? Did the developer do this on purpose? I wish I had answers to these questions or that the bank would hurry up and offer support, but I guess we’ll just have to wait until mid-July to find out.
Oh, and Miss Expatriate ended up finding a school computer with IE6 on it (*shudder*) and it STILL wouldn’t work. Of course, the people at the bank were clueless and said they’d look into it. So it goes…
UPDATE: Well, Bank of Taiwan has launched a new online ATM/Banking application that runs with both IE8 and Firefox 3.5, so all is well for now. Long overdue? Yes? The nice thing is that we’ve been using it for several months now to switch money between accounts (sending money to her parents, for example) and also sending money back to an American Wells Fargo account. All of this is done online and is relatively simple. Good work, Bank of Taiwan.
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