Halifax on-line banking & Firefox

Consumerist

LHW99 wrote: »

I note that when I try Halifax banking, it wants to run an adobe flash file.

I always have flash disabled by default (doesn't cause issues generally) so is it flash that's causing problems?

Interesting. I don't have a Flash player plug-in on my Firefox and it could be that Halifax doesn't know how to deal with that.

I haven't had time to disable add-ons one by one yet (forgot about plug-ins!) to see what's causing the problem.

Thanks for the input.

forgotmyname

Having the same issue Halifax and Firefox, its advertising in the background. I did contact them on twitter the other day, but oi have not replied to their message yet.

It is loading something like advertising.halifax..... and its a script file that popped up on my computer and asked me to save it. its a blank file though.

RumRat

have you tried setting the plugin to Ask before activating instead of disabling it? It should say what's trying to open it then.

ManAtHome

Consumerist wrote: »

Interesting. I don't have a Flash player plug-in on my Firefox and it could be that Halifax doesn't know how to deal with that.

I don't have Flash either, but no problem with Halifax. Only FF plug-in I have these days is Nitro PDF viewer.

forgotmyname

Got it..

Its a script from the URL...

https marketing.halifax-online co uk

/ and . . removed to stop it becoming a clickable link. (hopefully)

It asks me to save a file with a return.function.var filename.. I presume its showing me the script rather than loading it properly?


Pic..

Consumerist

Many thanks for your input and suggestions guys & gals. I clearly need to get to the bottom of it when I get the time.

I can work around the problem, for the moment, by restarting Firefox with add-ons disabled when online banking.

I'll post again if I find a solution. I'd be glad to hear if anyone else finds a permanent solution in the meantime.

forgotmyname

Solution = halifax need to cut down on the marketing and get rid of webtrends.

Not sure about others, but when I log into my bank account I do not want to see a list of websites that are also loading in the background.

I complained to them some time back asking why facebook was listed in the pages loading with my secure connection. Asking them how secire that is, It vanished very quickly after that.

But now they have webtrendslive loading (why) ?

Consumerist

Ok. Sorted.

In my case it would seem to have been down to Firefox's NoScript add-on which sanitizes cross-site scripting (XSS). By deselecting both these options in NoScript the Halifax online banking seems to work ok.

I had started to notice that other online banking sites were showing the same symptoms but have yet to check these out.

It is probable that banking sites which use Google APIs to run their websites have all started to have this problem and the APIs may have changed recently. Only a guess, though.

Hope this helps anyone else having similar problems.

Thanks again guys and gals.

Edit
Post edited - both XSS options should be deselected whilst banking on-line.

Ovation1357

I'm hitting exactly the same problem - It affects both Halifax and Lloyds online banking as they use the same application for both sites.

I'm not at all happy about the idea of disabling XSS protection - their site clearly employs some poor (perhaps even dangerous) security practices and they should fix this.
NoScript is a very widely used add-on, as are many other security/privacy addons, so it's really not unreasonable to expect them to code their site in a way which doesn't trigger security protection mechanisms.

Thankfully my day-to-day banking is not with them (particularly as their online banking is a bit pants in general) but it's a pain when I occasionally log in.

forgotmyname

When you say their online banking is pants are you referring to the old site which sort of worked except the issues mentioned above and the fact some stuff was tucked away in odd places, OR the new one which looks like it was designed by 5 year olds and it just AWFUL....???