Firefox Users: IE For Bills, Firefox For Everything Else

Posted Jul 27, 2008 | by Jason Faulkner  

Primarily, I use Firefox as my browser of choice, but as everyone knows the use of Internet Explorer is sometimes inevitable. What I [personally] have found is the most unfriendly sites to non-IE browsers (outside of Windows Update) are online bill payment sites. In fact, when I ran Linux exclusively a while back, I had to pay some of my bills at work because they simply would not work in Firefox/Konquerer/anything not IE.

The way I have combated this problem is by simply giving in and using IE, as I really don’t have any other choice. I have my bookmarks in Firefox set so that when I access them, IE View automatically opens the site in IE. Pretty seamless as I haven’t really had any issues since I started doing this several months back.

Hopefully, corporate web developers will start considering other browsers when developing for public use… and they will have to with the popularity of Mac and Linux growing.

Which Of These Traits Applies To YOUR Computing Life?...

10 Responses to “Firefox Users: IE For Bills, Firefox For Everything Else”

  1. John Mihaljevic says:

    IE Tab certainly is a very useful Firefox add-on. I an curious as to how to set FF bookmarks to automatically open in IE

  2. John P. Mackay says:

    I did download the IE Tab from Mozilla (Firefox) and install them. After the browser restart and I don’t see any IE Tab in top taskbar. I don’t know what I have done with this?? All I did is to install them and the browser ask me to restart then I click ” restart ” after that the browser is on again but no IE Tab.

    Hope that you can help me to get the IE Tab working in Firefox browser?

    Thank you,

    John P. Mackay
    Belleville, ON Canada eh?

    • Jason Faulkner says:

      My mistake, I use IE View (not IE Tab). I have updated the tip to reflect that.
      IE View simply opens specific URL’s you access in Firefox in IE automatically… in my case the bill sites.

  3. Floyd Bufkin says:

    I get around this by using my online banking site, which works fine in Linux and Firefox, to pay all of my bills.

  4. Alan David says:

    I’ve never had that problem with any of my bill payment services – and I even use MSN Money’s BillPay service (with FireFox).

    • cc says:

      i just drop my bill in mail, never have a problem, find it takes longer to boot up, log in etc then it does to write a check.

  5. Vic says:

    I just use Firefox’s IE Tab whenever I get on a Firefox unfriendly website such as edmunds.com or some websites requiring forms to be filled.

  6. Jason Faulkner says:

    In general, the biggest sites I have problems with are my utilities (water + electric). Their online payment apparently uses some Javascripting which isn’t FF friendly.

    I just tried to pay last week with FF and had no luck. Then used IE with no problem.

    Oh well.

  7. capricornus says:

    It’s the same everywhere, also in Belgium and the Netherlands. FF users should write angry mails to their banks and their webmasters, demanding clean html and javascripts, threatening them to close the account.

  8. Sugarloafvue says:

    I use my banking organization’s website to pay very nearly all my bills online. As of the last Firefox upgrade, I could access the site and view balances, make transfers between accounts, etc., but could not access the Bill Payment page.

    The issue for me was corrected by going to Firefox’s Tools / Options / Privacy tabs at the top of the page and marking the checkbox to Accept Third Party Cookies. I already have Firefox set to delete cookies when I exit the browser.

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