Chase bank decided to drop Google Chrome and Opera from their supported browser list and only supports IE 6 and higher, FireFox 2.0 and higher, and Safari 3.0 and higher. As a matter of fact, after July 18, 2010, if you browse Chase web site with an unsupported browser, you will get a “Page Not Found” error, so you will have to use those supported browsers to be able to access your account on-line.

Chase justifies their decision with two primary reasons: security and popularity. It is funny that they think IE 6 is more secure than Google Chrome and is still on their supported browser list, while Google officially stopped supporting IE 6 back in March and many web developers held a funeral for IE 6. As for the popularity, Chase argues that it is based on the types of browsers that customers used to access their site, and their data shows that 95% of customers used the supported browsers. However, to me both reasons are lame, and I think the real reason is that they are lazy. Firstly, IE 6 is anything but a secure modern web browser and should be removed from the supported browser list. Secondly, even though according to their own data, Chrome is not a “popular” browser, the usage of Chrome already exceeded Safari based on every source of web browser statistics. So Chase should embrace Google Chrome, instead of giving a lame “popularity” reason for dropping Chrome.

Web browser statistics:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share