Southern Electric use out of date browsers

I was more than a little surprised by Southern Electric, one of the largest energy suppliers in the UK, today. As one of their customers I had reason to contact them and rather than pay for their 0845 “local rate” number, which isn’t free on my mobile, I decided to use their LiveHelp facility.

That was when I discovered just how far out of date even major businesses can be. I needed to go six years back in time in technology terms to use the Southern Electric website. As soon as I clicked their LiveHelp link I was told “Sorry, we’re afraid that you won’t be able to use Livehelp with your browser and/or operating system.“. It took a few minutes to realise that it’s not because I’m running out of date software, it’s Southern Electric who are years behind the times.

They go on to tell me that LiveHelp works Internet Explorer version 6, 7 or 8 and Mozilla Firefox versions 2 and 3. I’m on a Windows 7 laptop and it shipped with Internet Explorer verision 9 installed so I’m one version too modern there. Firefox is even worse, I’m currently on version 14, version 2 was way back in 2006. Southern Electric are just as out of date for Safari and Netscape and don’t even mention Google Chrome.

I fail to understand how a company can be so massively out of date. Do they really expect their customers to be using five year old technology? It’s just inexcusable laziness not to update, they would be better off simply deleting the LiveHelp facility until they can update it to work with today’s technology.

Our advice on Tamebay would always to keep up to date with the latest Internet browser versions and in fact with all the software you use. That ensures you have the latest security fixes and hopefully fewer problems with your computer and if it means you can’t use some companies websites complain, there’s no excuse for them to be that far out of date.