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Why You Can't Pry IE6 Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
Esther Schindler writes "It's easy for techies to enumerate the reasons that Internet Explorer 6 should die. Although the percentage of users who use IE6 has dropped to about 12%, many web developers are forced to make sure their websites work with the ancient browser (which presents additional problems, such as keeping their companies from upgrading to newer versions of Windows). But rather than indulge in an emotional rant, in 'Why You Can't Pry IE6 Out Of Their Cold Dead Hands,' I set about to find out why the companies that remain standardized on IE6 haven't upgraded (never mind to what). In short: user and business-owner ignorance and/or disinterest in new technology; being stuck with a critical business app that relies on IE6; finding a budget to update internal IE6 apps that will work the same as they used to; and keeping users away from newer Web 2.0 sites."
Reminds me of this old story of how the design of the Space Shuttle was influenced by the width of a horses butt
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
My guess in general ? No. In the company I work in? Hell, no.
1. The manager is the owner. My disagreement from 2001, the reasons for it, and the suggested alternative are in his inbox.
2. It's been serving us faithfully for nearly nine years. No one gets fired for having engineered something like that.
3. It's trivial to run an emulator with the sole purpose to access our point of sale front end to ANOTHER obsolete app.
4. Rewriting the four sites that will not work with newer versions is not impossible, or that costly. Just unnecessary.
5. In the world of private ownership, department heads don't fire get fired for mistakes in the past, but for failure to handle the present.
7. No one got fired for buying IBM^H^H^H Microsoft.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Many custom corporate apps built between 2002-2006 were called "Web apps" but were really "IE6 apps". In the late 90's they would have been Windows apps built with Visual Basic. Companies thought they were modernizing to the Web but really just got a different kind of Windows app.
It continues with IE7 and IE8 ... these browsers are so incapable that, for example, a rich text editor for them is done as ActiveX instead of as HTML5, so you can't run the app anywhere but IE. Now that these companies are often running multiple platforms (Windows XP, Windows Vista/7, Mac OS, iPhone, Blackberry) they are getting bitten on the ass. It's like Y2K in that the future was never supposed to happen.
Microsoft succeeded in forking the Web. This is the aftermath. That's why HTML5 compatibility is so important, the focus on browser vendors in the spec means that Apple WebKit and Mozilla Gecko engineers do a lot of work to make their browsers compatible with each other. You have WebKit redoing canvas in the standard way, redoing Gears in the standard way. If you're locked into any one browser or one hardware that is not the Web, it is by definition only what's completely universal. If it's not universal (IE, Flash) it's not part of the Web.
I guess you really haven't done any development using IIS. You should look at the browsercap.ini file in IIS. As delivered by Microsoft, it treated Firefox as a very inferior browser compared to IE. You had to perform some serious hacking to this file in order to bring up the capablities to something reasonable. And even then IIS didn't treat Firefox the same. Let's face it, using IIS basically forced IE on the client. Plain and simple.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.