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MS — Dropping IE6 Support "Not an Option"
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft wants to see IE6 gone as much as anyone else, but the company isn't going to make the decision for its users anytime soon. The software giant has been pushing IE6 and IE7 users to move to IE8 ever since it arrived in March 2009, but it's still up to the user to make the final decision to upgrade: 'The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have. As engineers, we want people to upgrade to the latest version. We make it as easy as possible for them to upgrade. Ultimately, the choice to upgrade belongs to the person responsible for the PC.'" Of course some big Web sites aren't waiting for Microsoft. Reader Yamir writes, "Google's Orkut, a social networking service popular in Brazil and India, has started warning IE6 users that the browser will no longer be supported. Just last month, YouTube started showing a similar message."
I don't want to upgrade from IE6 for one very simple reason: I think the interfaces of the later IE versions suck donkey balls.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What is missed is that IE7 will never be offered for windows 2000- so IE 6 support is tied to Windows 2000 life cycle.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Come on, Microsoft, if you're trying to end-of-life an operating system that's actively being deployed on Netbooks, what's the problem with turning off support for IE6?
But they aren't trying to KILL IT, they just want it to DIE.
Like you're rich Uncle.
Right, but any patches would not affect IE6 once IE6 drops off support. When MS drops support on a product, that means you don't get patches for even discovered and documented bugs.
Corporations would scream blue bloody murder.
The same corporations who cannot upgrade from IE6 because so many software vendors made web-enabled applications using then-current Microsoft tools that specifically took advantage of features in IE6 that are not carried forward to IE7 or IE8. Companies purchased these packages because they were Web-enabled, and therefore should be less sensitive to the version of the operating system that the client PCs ran on. Except that software created by Microsoft toolkits back in the early 2000s were NOT "Web Enabled", they were "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 Enabled".
So the companies now have to look forward to an upgrade to massively important and multi-user software packages like Siebel, because only the newer versions can run on a newer browser. But the newer version is not an in-place upgrade because packages like that tend to be integrated to other systems, not standalone apps. So you have companies running Windows 2000 desktops and IE6 because an upgrade to either XP or IE7+ will shatter compatibility.
Our company runs IE6 (but at least we are on XP SP2). If you try to use Firefox on the Intranet, a lot of bits don't work, and that is the primary reason we're told the company isn't going IE7 or better anytime soon. We have a massive Intranet that was all built using Microsoft tools, and upgrading it would be a monumental task.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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Quite to the contrary. Microsoft makes it very difficult for users to upgrade to the latest version. FireFox and Opera both still support the current versions of their browsers on Windows 2000. Yet Microsoft had dropped Windows 2000 from their list of OS's supported by their newer browsers long ago, even when Windows 2000 was supported by Microsoft.
Have you ever wondered why all the other browser developers can support Windows 2000 while Microsoft is completely unable to? I mean, if the Microsoft engineers say they want to make it easy for people to upgrade, then I'm sure there must be some fundamental technical issue with IE that stymies the engineers, and prevents them from doing what they say they want to do. What is the problem that prevents Microsoft from bringing newer versions of IE to Windows 2000?