Friday, April 18, 2008

Paypal and safe browsers

According to the BBC, Paypal will restrict the use to its website to safe browsers. When you browse the Paypal website, it is clear, IE7 is the preferred and only choice. It has all these must have safety features blah, blah, blah.

I must say that I am surprised that the "other" browsers are not good enough. Not only would Paypal lose a big share of its customers, I just don't believe it. Their "safer browser faq" gives some information that is missing .. it allows for the fact that Firefox 2 or later and Opera 9.1 or later have anti phishing features.

What Paypal is talking about it a technique called "extended validation secure socket layer certificates". A company called Comodo holds the evsslcertificate website. On its mainpage they provide information about three browsers.. Mozilla, Opera and .... Conqueror. No info about Internet Explorer. When I read what they have to say, I get the distinct impression that these "other" browsers have been part of this project from the start.

I really have the impression that I am being manipulated / misinformed. This makes me feel cross. When Paypal's customers find that 25+% of their customers will not be able to use Paypal, or more correctly are manipulated in this way they will rightly be upset as well.

Really from a public relations point of view it sucks for Paypal.
Thanks,
GerardM

4 comments:

Hinderance said...

Just a superficial comment: "...the safer browser faq" - written with a lower-case 'q' makes it look like the word "fag" coupled with the underlined hyperlink. I'd suggest making it all caps: "FAQ" to remove any confusion ;-)

Great post, by the way.

Pat.

Minh Nguyễn said...

Firefox 3, due soon, supports EV certificates, and as the BBC article noted, there’s an extension for Firefox 2 that handles it. (It’s made by Verisign, if I’m not mistaken.)

I don’t think there’s a great risk that they’ll make Firefox users switch to IE just for Paypal, especially since IE isn’t available to Mac users and the 25+% that you mentioned.

Minh Nguyễn said...

Update: eBay apparently won’t be blocking “current versions of any browsers”. They gave the example of IE4 on Windows 98.

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