I re-read Sasha's post and also read a bit about Moon/Silver lights.

and now I feel concerned about BSNL's website, poor customers would not even know that they should re-size the window to ...

and this is useless statement, since Suse and Fedora are NOT two different operating systems!

If I remember correctly from my brief excursion into the sourcecode of both the main page and the applet frame, there was at lease one specific reference to "MAC" (possibly referencing the User Agent string) which altered the rendering of the page. I do not remember any specific referrences to "Linux" or any such thing, so chances are good that *something* is OS dependant (however rude that is!)

EDIT: Maybe it's only a minor thing, but here's the MAC/UserAgent thing:

No popup, even after enabling them.

And I didn't get as far as you, not even armed with your experiments report

Reviewed all the Firefox (3.6.10) settings under Edit -> Preferences (not in about:config land) and didn't find anything to let it run more rampant.

Found some more sites with SWECmd=Start in the URL and opened a selection; all opened normally. Nosed around the Seibel tech support chat online and played around with UserAgent strings again but got no further. In all cases saw only the wristwatch "waiting" cursor.

I did get one entertaining message on reloading the page (hadn't logged on, of course): "Your session timed out because you were idle for too long. Please log in again to resume. If you had a Siebel attachment open, your changes may have been lost. Please save the file locally, close it, and reattach it to the appropriate record". Presumably re-attaching Siebel attachments to appropriate records would be child's play after logging on!

More updates..

1) While there *is* some sort of applety thing being used, it may not be the very root of the problem. Also, I don't think that Moonlight/Silverlight is the problem either - I was wrong when I made the connection between "SWE" and Silverlight. "SWE" is "Siebel Web Engine", and is some sort of ActiveX-based "high interactivity" gadgety thing..

Have a look at this link, you will likely find the whole thread to be of interest-

http://vinuthomas.com/Forums/viewtopic/p=101322.html

-about half way down that thread, in particular, see this:
Meanwhile, I've installed Moonlight (and it works, tested it here, even installed some Microsoft pack of additional stuff for Silverlight (didn't help but gave me widgets on the bubble demo), available by clicking something on that bubble demo page), tested Java and Javascript, both are working, went to a couple popup tester websites and *most* of those tests worked pretty well.

Here's the good part:

Load the page up, wait till it finishes loading - the hourglass is OK. Now, hit SHIFT+TAB about 8 times; that will reverse-tab you up to the username input field. Enter username, hit TAB. Enter password, hit TAB. Hit return as you are now on the "GO" button (click mouse doesn't work since the focus is all wrong).

Fun stuff :/

Sasha, you ingenuity and determination are outstanding!

The tab workaround worked but I could not do anything after logging in because tabbing around the next page did not highlight anything.

It is not just a Linux issue. User difficulties and dissatisfaction are reported for the four selfcare.[ensw]dc.bsnl.co.in/selfcare/ sites (pages here and filtered to broadbandforum.in only).

Perhaps it simply illustrates the phenomena of monopolies (be they state or free market monopolies) not being very good at customer service because, in the absence of any threat from competition, customer service quality hardly affects them. That's one of the best arguments for a free market regulated as necessary by anti-trust legislation.

I enjoy troubleshooting (you're likely aware of that!) and sometimes, something about a particular issue interests me so I fiddle with it more. Trying to work around this was interesting and slightly educational.
Cool!
un-cool. :/
The above statement(s) apply just as well up here (eastern Canada) with some of our smaller ISP's that are providing "wireless broadband" service to rural areas like mine-- it seems, if (y)our service works well, then great; but if it doesn't work well or at all, you're sheet-outta-luck.

Unfortunately I don't have any BSNL accounts or I would definitely work on the internal pages some more. One thing I think might be able to help for this, is Firefox Greasemonkey, but I know so little about javascript and related technology these days, I wouldn't really know where to begin. However, I have found pretty easily, about a half-dozen existing Greasemonkey scripts designed to repair BSNL sites and services, just not one specifically tailored to YOUR site and your problem.

Also, there's a Firefox plugin that may help you (again, I dunno for sure and can't test it without an account--- it *might* work for *some* BSNL sites and account types, but not others).
Here's the plugin:
DataFox - Check your BSNL DataOne and MTNL Triband bandwidth utilization in Firefox at the click of a button.

Good luck! Darned monopolies...

Yes I am

It was curiosity for me too because I'm on an "unlimited" plan which has relatively low speed which is adequate for my usage -- and it may be that BSNL fix things faster in response to bad publicity than to complaints.