Schwab has been having problems with their coding. While I am not a trader, I am on the site daily as most of my income is generated by my account. I should also mention that before I retired I was a broker, a financial planner and ultimately I worked in the division where we consulted to large corporate and municipal pension plans. When I left the financial area as my work I move all the family accounts with a friend, He worked with full service firms over the years and when he moved due to his firm being acquired, we moved with him.
Nt friend passed in 2020 (not Covid) and I decided the best place to land was one where there were no commissions and I ran my account. I chose Schwab. When I began there At the end of 2020/Jan of 21 things worked well for me using P M. And then changes to the browser and to the Schwab site ended that. I did not have to time nor inclination for try to fix things, I needed access to all my financial accounts which I could not do using P M and I got FireFox. It had no issues.
Until recently I had many issues using Pale moon when it came to filling out forms and submitting things. So more FF. While P M remained my default browser I had to use FF on several sites.
I tried to replicate the money fund info steps listed above and got the same result when not logged on. I logged on and things improved but not anywhere near 100%. But, I am very active on the Schwab site. What happened when logged on I got an error message at the top of the blank page. When I clicked on it, this code came up::
I have no clue what it all means. However, I have watched Schwab struggle with upgrading their software. I have seen them break stuff and then fix it. Their new pages designs are awful in some cases. As far as I can tell they are struggling to make things work well both on phones and on PCs. I do not use a smart phone and do everything from my PC or recently acquired laptop.
In the 1980s when I was working in pension consulting my division used an offsite main frame and local dumb terminal for data entry. The somebody had to walk blocks to pick up the printout. The decision was made to migrate our system from the mainframe to an in-house PC network. The person who manage this was an old college buddy who was getting his PhD in computer science. He taught me the basics of how large interrelated databases worked. I was one of only two people in our department who had access to the data bases in order to make changes to the data when we discovered it was incorrect. it scared me to death doing that because I knew if ai made an accidental mistake I could blow things up and never know what I did so I could fix it. Today the coding has become so long and often convoluted that changes can break something they do not have any clue will happen.
Fast forward through the last 35 years and the code has gotten more complex and upgrades to the software at major financial institutions often inadvertently breaks something else. Schwab is not exempt from this. I have seen bad information, stuff that won't load or the same information on a single page presented twice and the numbers are not identical.
And then there is the fact that none of the major sites I use even knows that Pale Moon exists. They do not care about P M and do nothing to be compatible with it. So it is up to Marcus to change the P M code if possible and desired to make things work on some sites. That is why I finally got a second browser. It had to be FF as I needed something that worked and that was not Chrome or Edge or most of the others. I like P M and how it is privacy oriented, but when it will not work on a site I must use, then I have no option.
I am not a huge fan of FF and I will only use it on those sites where P M doesn't work properly. I will report back on how it worked on Citi and Chase when I try it those places. Meanwhile, I do not trust Schwab to have accurate information everywhere on the site nor do I expect not to have issues somewhere every time they try to upgrade their coding or page design. Fortunately my past experience in the industry makes it fairly easy for me to spot misinformation on the site. For the most part the info is OK, but not to where I just trust it when it looks like is is wrong.
But this bad coding happens all the time, Two days ago while working online and with CNBC on in the background (we use Verizon FIOS for all out services) my cable box suddenly rebooted itself. When it came back on the up and down button on the remote did not work and the Favorite channel list was gone and I could not repopulate it. I was on the chat and then the phone with them. I knew exactly what had happened. Bad coding in the update broke things. They were going to replace all out boxes claimed that was the issue, but I knew better. The said they would call me back in about 20 minutes with the info so i could turn in our current boxes and get upgraded ones. That call never came. The next morning the problem was still there. And the suddenly when I pushed the up and down channel button it worked. And then I discovered my favorites list was back and I could even edit it.
While I am not tech savvy in term of my sophistication, I have owned a PC since 1987 (not the same one). I can usually tell when bad code is the issue. I may not know where or why, I just know from the resulting issues that has to be the problem. it is why for the last 20 or so years I have turned off automatic updates and I never do an update to any software when it first comes out. I wait until enough time has passed for them to find the mistakes and fix them. But with the financial sites one doesn't get updates, they simply change the code behind the site and all users have to cope with it.
