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Alternative Details brings news that PayPal is developing a plan to stop users from accessing its financial services if they aren’t using browsers with anti-phishing protection. PayPal is recommending the use of blacklists, anti-fraud warning pages, and EV SSL certificates. Browsers without anti-phishing features will be considered "unsafe." It seems likely Safari will be included in this category given PayPal’s warning about the Apple browser last month.

"’At PayPal, we are in the process of reimplementing controls which will first warn our customers when logging in to PayPal of those browsers that we consider unsafe. Later, we plan on blocking customers from accessing the site from the most unsafe–usually the oldest–browsers,’ he declared. Barrett only mentioned old, out-of-support versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer among this group of ‘unsafe browsers,’ but it’s clear his warning extends to Apple’s Safari browser, which offers no anti-phishing protection and does not support the use of EV SSL certificates."

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Late last year Google fired a few shots at PayPal when they waived merchant fees at Google Checkout for the rest of the year. Today they hit hard, using their biggest gun to promote the service: the Google homepage.

Google has added a link to Google Checkout along with a $10 coupon to use with Google Checkout merchants. Hitwise predicts we’ll see a big spike in Google Checkout traffic. I agree.

Small merchants overwhelmingly use PayPal to take credit card payments (we use them on CrunchBoard). But Google’s Checkout product is superior in a lot of ways. And the fact that they are promoting it on the Google home page and in search results is a real competitive advantage. Whether it is enough to overcome PayPal’s own big gun - their lock on eBay - isn’t obvious. But everyone loves a good fight, and the word is Checkout has more interesting stuff coming.

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