[pseudo]

Last night I was at a party and one of the guests was saying how she was looking to buy a new computer and was considering an iMac G5. Then she said she had to give up on that because "Mac won't work with Bloomberg or Charles Schwab". Apparently she was told that the iMac will not be compatible with these web sites (or the extra tools/services that they provide). I just wonder though whether that is true, or that if it can be solved by using a different browser (maybe they won't work with Safari but will work with Firefox?). Any Mac users here that actually use these web sites can help?

BTW I don't think Virtual PC is the answer here... too much trouble for her.

[Big Mac]

There's nothing too exotic on the main Charles Schwab client site. I'm not a heavy trader, but I have had no problem with it. I can't speak to Schwab Trader CT because I haven't used it, but it doesn't seem that much different. People need to understand that Safari is compatible with 90% of the content out there; Firefox handles another 5%. There are some proprietary IE sites, we must admit, but those are a dying breed because IE itself is dying. On the other hand, if the person in question is a serious trader who uses proprietary stock tools, there is unfortunately a dearth of proprietary trading solutions for the Mac.

[Thorzdad]

I'm not familiar with those sites specifically, but there are financial sites out there that employ active-x to bring real-time stock tickers and data. That might be what the discussion is about. Just a thought.

[Millennium]

There are a lot of stock-related apps out there, and unfortunately most of them are Windows-only (in fact, I've never seen one that deigned to offer a Mac version). I suppose it comes as no surprise that they wouldn't bother to test Macs on their Websites. It's some kind of stock industry thing.

That said, if you enable the Debug menu on Safari, you can tell it to lie about its User-Agent so that the site will think it's IE/Win or whatever else you want. This is generally not considered good practice, because the site's logs won't register a hit from a Mac, so there will be no indication that there's a Mac user who wants to access the site. However, if nothing else works then nothing else works.

Try this, and report back on how well it works. If it works well enough, then perhaps a letter-writing campaign might be in order.

[silversurfer66]

I'm typing this right now while logged into Bloomberg. It's a bit slow, but it works. Also, a more senior colleague of mine, I believe may have a native version of Bloomberg running on his PowerMac.