Recently a bug was reported for the Bank of America (BOA) website. The problem is that BOA is alerting Firefox users on OSX that the site may not work for the browser they are using. We have a really nice contact at BOA so I reached out this morning to find out what’s up. He said that Firefox for OSX has dipped below 1% of their overall traffic. They have a policy that any browser with this low of traffic is not officially supported.
Some random questions came to my head while I scratched it:
OK, so what about Firefox on Windows? Yep that’s supported.
Is Chrome OSX supported? Yeah, obvi.
What could be different between Windows and OSX Firefox versions? Not much.
What does Officially Supported mean? Now we’re getting deep.
Does it require more testing for QA? Probably not, if it works in Windows.
What about customer service? Well they already support browsers in OSX and they know how Firefox works.
Do they prevent Firefox OSX from using the site? Nah.
Will users see that alert as a reason to use another browser, assuming Firefox is less secure? My brain hurts.
At the end of the day Firefox in OSX will continue to work fine on this website, but users will be nagged at every visit. Not a great experience and not great for the web. Let's hope that they reconsider this policy over time.