This week we’ve seen an issue where customers that use the Barclays.net Corporate Banking portal have been unable to log on to the bank because Barclays are rejecting visitors with the newest and most secure version of Firefox ESR (78.4.0). Barclays are simply not ready for it. At time of writing users with 78.3.1 are able to log on (which makes the digital channels PDF very out of date).
As you may know already, Firefox ESR is our recommended web browser. The ESR flavour of this browser is (in our experience) more stable than many other browsers, and Mozilla are pro privacy. We therefore always install this version (this is why) and set it to default. Some customers who use the Barclays.net Corporate Banking portal at barclays.net are required to use the more stable version of Firefox ESR and so it’s normally a bonus to those customers too.
New versions of Firefox ESR are released approximately monthly [>] and our patch management tools automatically upgrade customers systems to with patches to this software within one working day of release. As a result, for some users, we’ve had to roll back to the earlier version and we’ve now blocked installation of the newer version, which is a shame given it includes security fixes like this. We will at some point install the later version for customers, but we want to better clarify why we sent this warning out a couple of days ago.