Internet Explorer 7 in 3120 RC1 Detecting Mac OS on USAA.com

[fenriz79]

I am running Vista Ultimate on Parallels 3120 RC beta. When I access www.usaa.com (my bank) and attempt to use their "Deposit@Home" feature, the website is telling me it doesn't support Mac yet.

Is there a way around this? Sure, I'm using a Mac, but I thought Parallels would make sites see my Vista install and IE 7.

Any ideas?

PS - Any other USAA customers out there?? Write them and tell them we want Mac support for the Deposit@Home feature

 

[dkp]

I am running Vista Ultimate on Parallels 3120 RC beta. When I access www.usaa.com (my bank) and attempt to use their "Deposit@Home" feature, the website is telling me it doesn't support Mac yet.

Is there a way around this? Sure, I'm using a Mac, but I thought Parallels would make sites see my Vista install and IE 7.

Any ideas?

PS - Any other USAA customers out there?? Write them and tell them we want Mac support for the Deposit@Home feature

Call them and tell them their system should be paying attention to the browser, not the OS it is running in. VM's are going to drive a lot of web designers to drink before it's sorted out. The old rules don't apply. Don't hold your breath waiting for someone at the bank to understand the problem.

 

[serv]

Hmm... As far as I know the browser and the OS detection on web servers is generally implemented by parsing User-Agent string passed in by the browser. It looks like this for XP/IE6:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
or for Safari in OSX:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3
Vista IE7:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)
There's not a single chance IE7 in a VM will report it's running on a Mac.
The problem with User-Agent string parsing is that the format is not standardized and "parsing" is generally done by searching for known substrings and and making random assumption if none found. My guess is that USAA just doesn't support Vista/IE7 yet and assumes its a Mac then.
Your other option becides calling them would be to try Firefox from Vista.

 

[logandzwon]

What serv said..

Also you can try enabling the debug menu on safari and setting your user agent to msie/windows. 90% of the time some website complains it is not comablie with safari that will fix the issue.