It’s no surprise that lenders offer varying rates to consumers with different credit histories, but how about loan rates changing based on the web browser used?

That was the case for “Devin,” who wrote about his experience seeking a Capital One car loan on The Consumerist web site. To be fair, Devin installed fresh versions of the browsers in order to make sure the changes didn't result from different cookie settings.

Here’s the post:

So this is a new one. Not sure if you've seen it before. I just put my order in for my Nissan Leaf and received the total price for it so decided it'd be a good idea to take a look and see what auto loan rates were. I checked my credit union first and they currently are offering 3.99%. Not bad, but about a week ago Capital One had sent me an email advertising a 3.10% rate. I went to check the website using my default browser (Firefox 4 Beta 6) and noticed it was at 3.5%.

I figured it had just gone up since I received the email. I tried to use their little payment calculator but the flash based widget wouldn't work properly in the Firefox Beta so I loaded up Safari to try and funny enough the rate offered was 2.7%. I checked in Chrome and Opera to see if it was maybe just something wrong with the Firefox beta and Chrome's rate was 2.3% while Opera's was 3.1%.

I'm not sure why Capital One would choose to offer Chrome users a lower rate than Firefox users, but it's interesting nonetheless.