On the subject of standards compliance, I logged on to American Express’s new online account service with Firefox and was stunned to find it barely worked!  Under Firefox it demonstrates some extremely odd layout issues such as drop boxes with ill fitting text and portions of the text obscured by colored boxes.

Its hard to believe that in December of 2005, a major corporation has released a keystone of their online self service system in an Internet Explorer only form – even more importantly, the way it works would tend to imply it was never tested with Firefox – and this for a financial services application!

I’m not a zealot, I’ll use IE if I have to with the Amex site and this issue is probably not a deal breaker, but throw it together with their high interest rates, Indian call center*, the fact they resell your information to all sorts of people, and the problem of not all vendors accepting the card and it really makes me wonder what I get out of it.

*I’ve had positive experiences with Dell’s call center in India, but I’ve finished more than one conversation with Amex’s in an angry tone.  They seem to have a curious combination of inflexibility, misinformation and stupidity.

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 @ 8:46 pm Technology
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