I was annoyed. The reason to use a Linux OS is for better online security. My bank's web page would open with Kubuntu and Firefox, Chrome, and others, but I did not have all the functionality. Specifically, I could not use the deposit a check feature. It kept complaining that I had the wrong version of Java. You would expect any feature on a web page to work with the GNU free version of Java that Ubuntu and variants come with. Nope. My bank's web page refused to work with Kubuntu. I kept having to use my Windows machine to make deposits. I toyed around with replacing my Java with the Oracle version, but I found a much simpler solution. I installed the User Agent Switcher plugin to Firefox. Before going to my bank's web site, I had the plugin report that I was using Internet Explorer 8 with Windows 7. Voilà! All of a sudden the deposit feature worked just fine. I tested it with a $2 money order that I got at Walmart. I wanted to make sure it worked before trying it with any high-dollar check. It worked great. I did worry that it was going to complain that my "IE 8" was too old, but it worked. I was surprised that User Agent Switcher doesn't report later versions of browsers, but I'm happy it works. When I logged into my Yahoo email account, Yahoo defaulted to a very old version of the email app, saying that IE 8 doesn't support the new version. So I leave this plugin disabled until I need to use it on my bank's web page.
This does show me that my bank could support Linux, Ubuntu and variants at the very least, with a modicum of effort. Their script was simply detecting the OS and refusing to let that feature work if it detected something other than Windows or Mac.
This does show me that my bank could support Linux, Ubuntu and variants at the very least, with a modicum of effort. Their script was simply detecting the OS and refusing to let that feature work if it detected something other than Windows or Mac.
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