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by bob1029 1433 days ago
This is pretty lame BS. I am literally right in the middle of building a public web app (also for a bank) that does not have any sort of arbitrary user agent constraints.

As long as your browser supports reasonably-modern things like flexbox and media queries, my app is just going to work on your machine. Even if it doesn't support these things, I don't see any reason to artificially get in the way of something you might otherwise be able to string along regardless.

I roll 100% vanilla JS/CSS these days so that I can avoid getting entrapped in the kinds of hells that likely entrapped these mbna web developers. It is quite possible they use some JS framework that has a tight dependency on a certain cohort of browser vendors & versions.

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Note: MBNA Canada is owned by TD.com (one of the 5 major banks in Canada) and not the US MBNA. In my estimation, it's likely that they've looked at the numbers and are essentially 'firing' FF customers b/c they don't drive enough rev.

CIBC (another bank here) has been doing this for at least 15 years by offering seemingly 'cheaper' banking services using the same systems but different brands (eg PC financial). The downmarket brand seems cheaper on the surface but they take away all the costly things the flagship brand gives away (eg in-person banking, no fee transactions, etc) and charge [more] for them.

Our telcos here do the same thing with MVNOs (eg Rogers, the flagship brand, owns Chatr, for poor ppl).