2 steps forward, 4 steps back: stumbling towards silly season

We recently changed HR/benefits companies, from a nationally-known brand to a local/regional one. This is mostly uninteresting, except if they dick us over (something that happened roughly every 8 seconds with the old one) the people responsible are just down the street, instead of elsewhere in the great wide world.

Anyway, one of the supposedly awesome things about this new company is that everything - EVERYTHING! - is stored in the cloud. Need to make any changes to anything WRT your HR “file”? Don’t pick up that phone - log in! Use the Web, it’s fantastic! We won’t even get a paystub - it’ll be downloadable online!

So today I tried just that. Here are the first 2 impressions the service made:

1. MSIE is the only supported browser. Gecko (all flavors) and WebKit (all flavors) are not supported.
2. The “Your browser is not supported” page it redirects you to is 404.

I can’t go any farther, even with a copy of Parallels handy, because my account isn’t set up yet (but I am technically required to be filing my time in the online timesheet app).

I really can’t understand building an app that won’t work at all in anything but IE, marketshare be damned: Firefox is no longer a bit player on the Web. Favoring IE, fine; but IE only? Is that even remotely sensible?

If their “web site” is a means to deliver binary artifacts over port 443, then we will be having words. I fear the binary artifact future; quite the silly season it will be, and we should be working hard to smash it to pieces.