startup hustle

It was recently brought to my attention that if you visit the Merrill Lynch corporate site using the Google Chrome browser, you would get a “Incompatible Browser Detected” error. That can’t be right. One of the biggest financial companies in the world probably gets hundreds of thousands of pageviews from the Chrome browser every month. Here is a screen shot of the error.

Notice the browser versions they do support; IE 5, Netscape (what is that?), and Firefox 0.8. Talk about being out of touch with current web trends. Netscape doesn’t even register on browser market share reports anymore and Chrome is closing in on FireFox as the second most used browser behind the free falling Internet Explorer.

The only question that comes to mind after experiencing this would be, is this a corporate policy that the internal tech team is fighting? Or is this choice coming from the internal tech team because they are too lazy to get the site to work with modern browsers? Either way, this is lame.