Did Firefox market share cause major changes to online banking in Taiwan?

On February 27, 2007, Gen Kanai wrote an excellent blog post titled the cost of monoculture, which describes the state of the Web in Korea.  Gen unfolds the decisions made by the Korean government that have forced computer/Internet users to use Microsoft’s ActiveX control to do any encrypted communication online.

Luckily, this extreme monoculture does not exist in most other countries, but it doesn’t mean that users are always free to choose whatever browser they want when doing things like banking transactions.  Sites are still being created that require an ActiveX control to do encrypted communication.

For example, in Taiwan many people use Web ATM to do online banking.  The Taiwan Review wrote an interesting article in 2005 called, “A Web of Opportunity“.  In that article, they discuss the benefits of Web ATM:

“Some forward-looking local banks have introduced a new solution, Web ATM, a Web page that allows payers to transfer funds directly using a chip-stored identity card and their own card reader. Chip cards are much safer than the magnetic strip variety and as a consequence of this heightened security, Taiwan’s banks are now required to replace magnetic strip ATM cards with them.”

The problem is that all banks with Web ATM service required an ActiveX control, so users had to no choice but to use Internet Explorer.

Until now.

We recently got word that E.SUN Bank‘s Web ATM became the first to support Firefox (and other browsers with the same plug-in framework) on Windows.  What an accomplishment and a step forward for banking on the Web in Taiwan!

I began to wonder about E.SUN’s motivation for this change.

• Did E.SUN Bank do this because of changes in browser market share?
• Did their users demand Firefox support?
• Was there a business opportunity for them to be the first to market?
• Are they a progressive organization promoting open standards for the Web?

Regardless of the strategic motivation behind this decision, online banking just changed in Taiwan and users benefit by now having more choice on the Web.

Soon after this decision, our Taiwanese localization team contacted us to ask how we can feature and promote this new service.  In this bug, you’ll see the discussion and decision to feature E.SUN Bank on pages that we serve to Taiwanese Firefox users on Windows.  Staś  really sums it up best with his opening remark:

“E.SUN Bank from Taiwan has done a big effort to make their website available for Firefox users. This is an important step for Firefox adoption in the region and consequently, we would like to feature a link to their website for a certain period of time on the zh-TW web parts (whatsnew, firstrun and central pages)….The important thing is to show the link only to Windows users. We would love to see this live for the 3.0.8 release.”

Web evangelism efforts like these are taking place in Mozilla locales across the globe.  Without having much to do with it, I am still proud of the accomplishment and that we can shine a spotlight on E.SUN Bank for crossing that frontier.  A big congratulations is due to E.SUN Bank, the MozTW team (Bob Chao, Tim Dream, and flybird), and Gen.  Thank you, guys.