Chredge, Unfortunately, To The Rescue

[van p]

Saturday I installed MS's Windows monthly updates, followed by the W10 20H2 upgrade. Somewhere in this process Chredge wound up on my machine.

A day or two before that I had received an email from my employer's payroll service provider, my first from them. There's a horizontal graphic across the top of the email and a shallower graphic at the bottom. In between is the text. Using Pale Moon, Cyberfox (don't give me no grief), and an old version of Waterfox (don't give me no grief) the entire email was squished into a narrow column on the left side of the screen so that the email used less horizontal space to display the contents but more vertical space. Everything was legible and intact, and I understood what it was saying. I opened the email in Chredge, and it was normal.

Today I tried to get into my U.S. Bank online account (yo, Pallid Planetoid, listen up). I did this Wednesday, and everything was normal. Today, it let me log in but wanted a mobile phone number for some kind of security purpose. I was able to click past that, but it took me to a preliminary account screen I had never seen before. My account was listed there, but it wouldn't let me click there or anywhere else on the screen, including "Log Out." It seems that sometimes simply closing the browser would log me out, and sometimes I had to re-start the computer to get logged out. Same results with the other 2 browsers. Now, I'm not getting the phone number request (maybe that would change if I re-started the computer), but it's still taking me to the preliminary account screen where I can't click on anything. Again, Chredge allowed me to get to my account and click on stuff. I spoke on the phone with 3 different customer service offices. The last person said I should have received the phone number request only on a mobile device and he would forward my situation to yet another office for review. Of course, the subject of browsers came up, and he hadn't heard of any of my browsers. Assuming the Windows updates didn't cause this situation, apparently something happened on U.S. Bank's end since Wednesday. I may yet hear something meaningful from the bank about this, but again, Chredge handled the issue.

So, are we to the point that a Chromium browser needs to kept at the ready in case a Firefox-like browser encounters something it can't get past? (If anybody has an account there and has Firefox, please try logging in and see what happens.)

Thanks.

[moonbat]

So, are we to the point that a Chromium browser needs to kept at the ready in case a Firefox-like browser encounters something it can't get past?

We have always been at this point since the IE days. Even when Firefox was at its zenith, I used IE and nothing else to access bank and especially Indian govt websites pertaining to taxes. 'This site best viewed with IE6 at 1024x768 resolution' was a standard banner until as late as 2014 on some of those sites. Rather than dick around with UA spoofing or remembering to turn off my adblocker, I simply would use IE for these sites and get on with it. Chrome is the new IE so nothing has really changed, and I don't know why having more than one browser is such a big deal for some, not necessarily you.

[Tharthan]

Off-topic:

I don't know why having more than one browser is such a big deal for some

My take on this:

I don't mind having multiple browsers on my computer if I can say in good faith that I can both (relatively) comfortably and honestly utilise the browsers in question. Case in point: I have both Pale Moon and Basilisk installed on my computer, with the latter functioning as a secondary browser.

But I cannot reasonably claim that I could use Chrom(e/ium) or modern Mozilla Firefox in good faith. So I don't use them.

[van p]

I never downloaded Basilisk. Pallid Planetoid and I both discussed U.S. Bank in the past. Can anybody hazard a guess about whether Basilisk might work on that site?

[Moonbird]

Well, I have a good bank, that lets me access my web account with Pale Moon. But is it worth changing the bank if that's not the case?

Using the spyware-browsers for just one task... at least, they don't spy on you that much! They become a much lesser threat to your privacy, if you use them for one website only.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

My bank also continues to work on UXP despite their JS abomination of a new site.. I want the one they had in 2001 back personally.

I also use Microsoft Chrome as a web service runner for web services that are services on the web and are by either Google or Microsoft. They suck.

[ron_1]

I never downloaded Basilisk. Pallid Planetoid and I both discussed U.S. Bank in the past. Can anybody hazard a guess about whether Basilisk might work on that site?

It does not. Note that it has been months since I've tested it, but I don't think anything would have changed.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Unless it is EME (DRM) which is busted or WebRTC (which despite being 100% to spec is rejected by nearly ALL mainstream services mostly those part of the Google Axis) there should be no significant feature or rendering capabilities when it comes to the web between ANY Allied UXP Web Client.

So outside those two specific cases there is no benefit to trying something in Basilisk if it doesn't work in Pale Moon. I really wish people would get it through their heads that aside from those two bits the differences in Pale Moon and Basilisk are largely application frontend wise and and the relative potential for old and insecure Firefox Extensions to have a higher chance of working unmodified.

While this analogy is flawed as hell and I hate making it.. If you take websites (and some js features) out of the picture then Pale Moon is a supped up Firefox 24 and Basilisk is Firefox 52 without incomplete webextension support. The things that make those different for anything not web site related are the things that make Pale Moon and Basilisk different. Of course you add back in the extensive work done on Pale Moon's application front end and relative capabilities running old and insecure Firefox Extensions into account and they DO seem even more different but not when it comes to rendering and displaying sites or running javascript.

[van p]

As I mentioned, I was told I would hear back from U.S. Bank, but of course that didn't happen. So, Chredge it is, then, for that site unless something happens in the future to change things. Thanks for the responses.

[Moonchild]

Don't feel too bad. with the latest "improvements" Skrill has made to their website, I'm forced to use Chredge as well for that one site.

[van p]

Great, I'm not alone. See ya on the front lines.