Do David Murray and his collection of nerds who are upgrading the Commonwealth Bank’s retail services understand technology? The launch of the CBA’s online Netbank operation late last week stumbled on its first day of operation, preventing many customers with the latest Windows and Internet Explorer programs from accessing their details.

The CBA put up the new Netbank website on Friday, and planned to take live a new version of the complete Netbank to customers over the weekend. It was to be a staged launch with some of the 50,000 Netbank customers being linked up straight away. The rest will be “migrated” to the new system over the next few months. And that’s a good thing, judging by what happened on the first day: chaos for those customers with the latest nifty piece of software that blocks pop-up ads.

The problem was anyone who with a pop-up blocker installed was unable to log into the new Netbank on Friday. Why? Because the login button on the new Netbank website was set up in such a way that a pop-up-blocking program was triggered by trying to logon. No matter how many times you clicked on the login button, the login screen was blocked by Internet Explorer’s pop-up blocker.

The problem was fixed on Saturday morning with a new version of the login button which is pop-up blocker friendly. Pop-up blockers are installed by default on firefox and new versions of internet explorer. The google toolbar also has a built-in pop-up blocker. You have to wonder where the CBA’s developers have been for the past year because that’s when pop-up blocking programs have become more common.

CRIKEY: Ironically enough, we’re pretty much all luddites here in the Crikey bunker, and Glenn’s spray brought to mind a certain phrase about the pot calling the kettle black. The Crikey website, crikey.com.au, had a few technical problems of its own over the weekind, making it impossible to read stories and attracting quite a few p*ssed-off emails before the problem was finally fixed late on Sunday night. Sorry to all…