Marketing:Standardized Letters: Online Banking Services

Dear {Bank},

Your online banking service should allow customers to use Mozilla Firefox but currently doesn't. According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, Firefox is used for almost 20% of page views on the Internet and this is increasing by almost 1.5% each month. It was downloaded 5 million times in a fortnight from www.mozilla.org and received reviews such as "the browser is an absolute joy to use — smart, fast and very user-friendly. Once you try Firefox you'll wonder why anyone uses any other web browser," from Wired Magazine.

Your banking system actually allows Netscape Navigator, but this is only used for about 2 percent of internet page views. Firefox is actually based on Netscape but is far more popular. Visit www.mozilla.org for more information about Firefox. Firefox has all of the necessary encryption technology and works perfectly with the online banking systems that do not artificially block it. In fact, I have successfully been able to use Firefox to access your online bank by making it say it was Internet Explorer.

You may be aware that the the U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team is warning Web surfers to stop using Interner Explorer and switch to other browsers. According to them, the available security updates still leave too many security flaws and are a cause of credit card number theft. The continuous updates for Internet Explorer are often difficult and time consuming to install. Updates for Firefox are small and infrequent, and can be set to download automatically.

According to www.secunia.com, an independent security monitoring organization, Firefox currently has no outstanding security issues, out of a total of 13 security advisories in the last two years. None of these were labeled "extremely critical" and 2 were labeled "highly critical". Currently, Secunia lists 18 outstanding security issues out of 69 advisories for Internet Explorer 6.0 in the last two years, 15% of which were labeled "extremely critical" and 30%, "highly critical". If you aren't using Windows XP and haven't been able to download Service Pack 2, there are even more outstanding security issues which viruses can use to install themselves on computers.

People on Macs or Linux shouldn't have to install Internet Explorer to access your online banking (it is far more difficult than installing Firefox), and anyone not using Windows XP can no longer get IE security updates from Microsoft, compounding the security problem.

I hope you will choose to add Firefox to the list for your Online Banking software so that it does not refuse to allow Firefox users.


Thanks for your consideration,