Google says the newly launched browser, Chrome, may not work for many online banking sites on the mainland due to compatibility problems.
A lot of mainland online banking sites used Active X, a proprietary Microsoft feature for login validation, which did not work on the new Google browser, said Linus Upson, director of engineering for Google.
The compatibility problem extends to other websites which use proprietary Microsoft features.
In addition, proprietary functions for defining the height and width of elements in a Web page under the Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer, will also not work through Chrome.
Compared with the rest of the world, the compatibility problems of Chrome were most serious on the mainland and South Korea, said Mr Upson.
'Many websites in China are designed for Internet Explorer only. They use a lot of proprietary Microsoft features,' said Mr Upson.
'This is different from countries in North America and Europe where Web developers are used to designing websites which work with different browsers, such as Netscape and Mozilla Firefox.'
