Why It’s PayPal’s Fault, Not The Browser
April 27, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
About a week ago there was some buzz floating around about how PayPal may block Safari because it doesn’t have phishing protection built in. This has since been retracted by PayPal:
PayPal: No plans to block Safari
A representative for PayPal on Friday said the ecommerce firm is developing features to block customers from logging into PayPal when using obsolete browsers on outdated or unsupported operating systems, but has no intention of blocking Safari as a company white paper seemed to imply.
“An example of such a browser/OS combination might be, for example, Internet Explorer 4 running on Windows 98,” said spokesperson Michael Oldenburg. “In doing so, we better protect our customers from viewing a phishing site through their browser. We have absolutely no intention of blocking current versions of any browsers, including Apple’s Safari, from our website.”
(Nugget by AppleInsider)
Might I suggest that it’s not the browser’s responsibility to block security threats on particular web sites? Maybe it’s my not-liking of blaming others for your own problems but I believe that PayPal and PayPal only is responsible for their own PayPal.com site. It’s their job to keep their customers safe, not browser developers, or any other type of web application developer.
Sure, I have a little bit of a bias here. I used to be a large (in my mind) PayPal merchant, who ditched all that in favor of better customer service elsewhere. I know I’m not alone in that boat. However, I feel the same way when eBay blames Apple or denies support of the site if you’re using Safari on eBay.
(Wait a second, I may be on to something here, both PayPal and eBay are owned by eBay and both were virtually run into the ground under Meg Whitman).
To close out this ranting post, let me say that I fully support web application developers and browser developers who want to protect their own customers from the dark side of the Internet, but I don’t think the fault and responsibility should lie on their shoulders as opposed to a multi-national corporation who certainly has the tools and resources available to help themselves help the world but chooses not to.
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