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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."
install chrome frame and problem is solved until such businesses get their head out of their collective asses.
It's not a secret that lock-in was why IIS and IE were designed to complement each other. The objective was to kill Netscape and Java by any means necessary. Active-X was a tool to this end.
And now we see the same tools who bought these chains exchanging them for IE8 and Sharepoint when they can. Because that won't be hard to get rid of.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No, they are not. They might want to, but they're not FORCED to do this. This means they are part of the problem, because if IE6 didn't work with most sites it would provide another reason to make the free upgrade.
Sorry, but having RTFA, I still can come back to just one reason for still using IE6: Ignorance.
Okay, so there's companies that have IE6-only apps. That's no reason to not upgrade: Nobody forces you to have only one browser. Even if you don't want to have IE6 and Firefox, you can have two versions of IE itself installed. You can set up the hideously-insecure IE6 to only be able to access the company intranet where you need it, and use IE7 or 8 for the rest of the world where having a more-modern, more-secure browser is useful.
Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here or here
Old hardware can run Firefox just fine - I used Portable Firefox for years when I was working for an IE-only company. You don't have to use the browser your company installs on your machine if you don't want to.
And as for IE6 keeping people away from sites like YouTube.. I'm not even going to dignify that with a refutation. Anyone who wants to get around that problem could do so without the slightest difficulty in the space of about ten minutes. This sounds more like a fairy story from the IT depertments to clueless PHB's: "Don't worry, boss, we don't need to block YouTube, it doesn't work with our browser. Not get out of my cubicle so I can watch the latest Foamy the Squirrel video, wouldya?"
So.. it has come to this
My corporate laptop is chained to IE6 because lots of the systems I administer have Java and JavaScript based configuration interfaces which only works with IE6. It fails on alternate browsers and even IE8 has issues (not to mention the fact that you have to have Java 1.4, Java 1.5 and Java 1.6 installed in parallel and switch to the right one for each machine).
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."
Microsoft designed IE6 with all sorts of cool interfaces for corporate developers. They then unleashed a wave of evangelists to encourage people to exploit those non-standard extensions, and encourage them to exploit the non-standard quirks. It was a deliberate strategy to gain and hold market share.
It worked. IE6 is unstoppable, even by Microsoft.
I'm the husband of a senior exec in a Fortune 500 company which will remain nameless (but you use their products every day anywhere in the world - it's a big one) I have noticed that they still use Windows XP and IE 6. Although my better half isn't in the IT department I have made this observation to her and the apparent reason is that IT is "waiting" to upgrade to Windows 7 (ie, they skipped Vista entirely) and they plan on doing "all the upgrades at the same time". The internet browser is not the key feature for their staff anyway (what really gets used is office and outlook 2007 plus a custom "IM" program). In fact, large chunks of the internet are blacklisted by the IT department. You just can't get there from the company VPN which is the only way to connect on the "company laptop" (good thing they don't know about "Ubuntu" so my wife and I can skype each other when she travels).
My understand is that it's not "ignorance" that is holding back the switch - rather the economic problems set back upgrades of company hardware that were planned for last year and have been pushed forwards to 2011 and the tech boys decided that if they're going to upgrade they'll do everything at once, including the browser.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You clearly haven't seen the sort of people who run these companies.
Why can't they use IE8 with IE6 compatibility? That way companies have no reason to be using IE6 for applications where a modern browser would work, and nothing should break. I realize this is too obvious to be a new suggestion, and I know IE8 has a compatibility mode (not sure what version it works with), so either Microsoft has dropped the ball or the higher-ups are more immune to logic and reason than I thought.
My webcomic
Afterwards the pieces of M$ should be given to the free software movements so interoperability can be acheived.
I know you're trolling, but that's the problem. You want everyone to switch to linux, and then you expect interoperability to be developed. It's not going to happen. The interoperability must come first, and then and ONLY then will linux even be considered for anything more than running the servers.\
Linux is like the DVORAK keyboard - apparently it was/is faster and apparently the layout was more "well thought out" than QWERTY. However you can't expect the whole world to suddenly switch unless there is a clear decisive advantage to investing hours of training and downtime to transition to the new standard. Dvorak is only "marginally" better than QWERTY - and even that small margin in speed is disputed, so it ends up being just not worth the up front cost of switching and retraining.
The same for linux. Yes it has come far. Yes ubuntu can be run by just about anyone. Yes there are similar apps available in linux. However by design, by omission and due to copyright/patent laws, they are different enough to require substantial investments in switching. Also very few of them have ALL the features available in current Windows software. And big business is showing you that even at X hundred dollars/product cycle, Microsoft products (and products designed only for Windows) are still "cheaper". It's not enough to "clone" current Windows software in linux. Something has to be made that is CLEARLY BETTER. Until then linux will remain the toy OS for nerds, or the stable OS quietly running things in the background invisible to Joe Average.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why should businesses keep "upgrading"? Really, Microsoft's OS hasn't changed much in the last decade. Almost everything runs under Windows 2000. Even ".NET" and Direct-X applications tend to work, and all the major open-source applications do. Why pay Microsoft more money? Most of this "upgrading" is planned obsolescence, not progress.
It was different in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Microsoft went from Windows 3.0/DOS, which was awful, to Windows 2000, which was a good OS. Desktop computing made great strides in the 1990s. But by 2000, the problems were solved. In Windows 2000, networking worked, 3D graphics worked, and the system was stable after the first service packs. For most businesses, that was good enough.
In the last decade, Microsoft went through Windows 2000, XP (which was really to pull the Win 95/98/ME crowd onto a decent platform), Vista (enough said), and now Windows 7 (the new, improved Vista.) At the end of this, we have an OS which offers essentially the same API as ten years ago. Not much has really changed.
Most commercial and open source applications work on Windows 2000, and almost all work on Windows XP. Load up the latest Firefox, and all the "Web 2.0" stuff works on Windows 2000. If you don't get too cute with tricky HTML and Javascript, the same code works on IE6 and later browsers.
Worse, Microsoft's newer OSs are oinkers. They need more CPU and more RAM to do the same thing. They phone home to Redmond constantly. They have activation problems. They're constantly getting updates, some of which make things worse. Why should companies pay for this? Where's the return on investment?
Yes, they are. If you work for a company with more than 10,000 employees (as I do), and if the company's standard browser (deployed and supported by Desktop services) is IE6 (as it is with us), and they pay you to develop a new internal web application (to go along with the 20 others that are already in use and designed for IE6 only) - well... you make it work with IE6 or you find a new job.
Why are F/OSS projects supporting IE at all? Presumably because some proportion of their userbase wants to and is willing to contribute time or money to make this support happen. When should F/OSS projects stop supporting IE6? When no one is willing to contribute the time or money required to support IE6.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Is it me or has Firefox got clunky lately? I used to use IE6 for my sins and converted over to FF but that is now heavy... Thought about Chrome but don't like giving the big G too much data or power than it already has..
Seems there's still a good number of web designers who are prepared to tell 28% (firefox share) of their potential customers to screw off.
migrate out of a Windows platform by one method or another JUST TO STAY marginally more safe in the Internet Security arena.
From what I've seen out of Apple and Microsoft lately, I don't see conclusive evidence that OS X is any more secure than Windows. At best, you'd get a short reprieve until the malware writers figure out there's a ton more Macs now, and start attacking them.
And in the meantime, you're dealing with a company which has way more lock-in and higher costs than Microsoft.
Why wouldn't they move to something actually better, like Linux? Or Solaris, or FreeBSD, or...
Moving to MacOS X give the opportunity to do work in MacOSX whenever possible and only revert to Windows as needed. What a gift.
Sure, if you happen to like OS X. I know plenty of people who actually prefer Windows.
Been using both Windows and Mac together for over a decade, since Win 3.11 (if I remember). It just is not that much different to get used to one OS or another or BOTH.
You're not in a position to really say much about that, then. I've been using Windows, Mac, and Linux on and off for years now. It's easy for me to get used to multiple OSes.
But most users are used to learning things by rote, and learning all the fiddly little details of what they use. I've seen users completely disoriented because their emails weren't colored correctly, because we upgraded them from one version of Outlook to another, or switched them to Thunderbird. I've seen my English professor have trouble launching a PowerPoint in OpenOffice, because she couldn't find the SlideShow button where she expected it -- she didn't think to look under the "SlideShow" menu, at the first item, called "SlideShow".
Companies look at these, and basically have to weigh the costs of firing a bunch of otherwise-useful employees who simply refuse to improve their computer skills to what we'd expect, or paying to retrain them on a new system, or continuing to throw money at the old system.
Frankly, I think they should just bite the bullet and upgrade, and pay attention to how technologically-adept new hires are in any field. I don't care if your job isn't to program the computer -- your job is to use the computer, so you should be good at that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The company I work for creates web based software used by large (by UK standards) banks and I can tell you that the vast majority of their userbase is stuck on IE6. The usual reason for this is compatability with old apps, and IE6 is not as backwards as they get - one of the mortgage processing/calculating apps used when I was sorting the paperwork for my flat was DOS based.
But compatability is *not* a valid excuse for not installing something newer. It *is* a reason for not installing IE8 (you can't run IE8 and IE6 on the same machine without virtualisation of some completely unsupported hack), but it doesn't stop them putting on Firefox/Chrome/Opera/... alongside IE6 and just letting IE6 live for as long as the older apps live (which may be some time given my witnessing of a DOS based app in business-as-usual use two-ana-half years ago).
They will not upgrade from "IE6 and only IE6" until the cost of doing so (design/testing/roll-out of new desktop builds, extra support time needed because if they go for the two browser stop-gap it will confuse many of their should-sacked-from-jobs-that-are-well-documented-to-require-computer-competence-for-not-being-able-understanding-such-things staff, paying for old software to be fixed/upgraded, and so on) is outweighed by the cost of staying where they are (those costs basically amounting to not being able to use certain software/sites (but they are big enough that saying "we'll consider your app if you support IE6" neatly sorts that) and looking like neanderthals (but the general public will never know and is doesn't really matter to them what us techies-in-the-know think)).
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.
They'll figure it out as sites start rendering incorrectly
No, they'll use a competitor's site that does support IE 6. My employer tried adding a pop-up to warn customers using IE 6 about the deficiencies of IE 6, but that resulted in a bunch of angry e-mails landing in my box, and it was gone the next day.
One of the things Microsoft did a great job on was the configurability of IE6. You can morph it to do almost anything you want.
Given that you have that power in your hands, configure IE6 to be a container application to run your one app, but prevent its use as a general browser. Give the users another browser to access the general internet.
Or at very least install Chrome Frame which will give your users a modern WebKit-based browser for websites that request it, while retaining the familiar IE interface.
The way many companies roll out new upgrades is to replace the hardware and software and apps all at once. Say you are a 1k people company with offices scattered in 20 locations. What does a roll out of a totally tested and cookie cutter tested solution to all upgrades cost every 5 years versus the same upgrades performed every 6 months. In disruption, training, lost productivity, support costs, testing time, shipping, etc. And the pace of hardware improvements have slowed enough and the work has become network hosted enough that you don't have to chase every generation of hardware any more...except for a select few where speed translates into profits.
It is a business decision and all you have to do is look at hardware sales to see it is happening at a slower pace.
IT departments aren't there to chase the latest flavor of the day or the techies fondest desires...they are there to support the business of making money. And rollouts cost big bucks so they get budget line scrutiny at the highest level of the corporation. Now if the recent penetrations cause CEOs to ask how well their IP is protected..there could be some acceleration. But when CEOs are worried about this weeks layoffs..it is hard to get their attention on a revision of software that is working..but which might cost 5 more jobs.
- Ability to specify proxy servers and prevent users from modifying them?
Do this at the perimeter, not on the client.
- Ability to restrict settings, etc etc etc
You can centralize Firefox about:config, you can also push it as an MSI. FrontMotion has a policy kit for FF as well. The policy settings aren't as extensive as IE but then there aren't as many holes that need to be accounted for either.
- Ability for Firefox to use the internal windows cert store
This one I have no answer for other than some logon scripting. Also, IE Tab though that is a suboptimal solution because you now need to support two environments.
And the worst part being, all these web apps were written for IE6. Some will function in Firefox/Chrome/Opera/etc but the primary ones we use the most every day, don't.
AND, they will never update it. Why? The hired a third party programmer to write the primary web app we use, and it was basically contract work. He wrote it, gave X amount of troubleshooting help with it, and that was it. If we need major fixes to it or additions to it, we can't. And if this software goes down, which it does on a weekly basis, we end up having to schedule a ton of call backs with customers we're speaking with on the phone since we can't help them without this piece of software generally.
Now, we all have personal directories on a virtual server we can use for storage of work related files (guides for routers, phone manuals, etc) and most people do in fact install Portable FireFox here and use it for their casual browsing of the internet between calls. Even our supervisors and managers do this as well as us peons. BUT, it is technically against company policy to install outside software of any kind and use it.. even if it is by far more secure and easier to use than what they offer. No one has gotten fired for it but my point being that there was grounds for it, compared to using the shitacular IE6. And trust me, you should see the spyware scan logs of the massive network of user pc's we have.. It just amazes me a company is so cheap it won't pay to have its software updated to accomodate security. It'd hate to be in the actual IT department at this place, their entire day must be spyware/virus removal.
Aw Frell this
Don't underestimate the impact of Windows 95/98. It still runs on old hardware, is compatible-enough it can still run most applications businesses need, etc. IE6 is the newest browser available.
If anyone has any suggestion for a full-featured browser that still runs on Windows 98, I could probably reduce the count of IE6 users by a few thousand. Don't bother mentioning Firefox. Mozilla.org gave-up Windows 9x compatibility with v3, so you're still left with an unsupported browser. That "EX"-something-or-other (to run XP apps on 9x) sounds clever, but is an overwhelming no-go in a business.
And suggesting hardware upgrades for everyone, when their needs are absolutely trivial, and already met, will similarly get met with extreme resistance in the "more frugal" (read: cheap as hell) organizations, such as mine.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well, technically it starts when your computer does. Any browser can create a window as fast as IE if it is already running. The cost of doing it like IE does is a slower boot up time and wasted memory when you are not using it.
I assume you're referring to the fact that one particular DLL (mshtml.dll) was loaded by the Windows UI shell to render HTML help and other things. AFAIK, this isn't true for recent versions of Windows.
In any case, the fact that one DLL is in memory isn't going to change the startup speed by that much. There are many files that IE needs to load and other misc initialization stuff that IE needs to do before it starts up. (e.g. load addons, setup protected mode, phishing filters etc)
FWIW, on my box Chrome starts up quicker than IE8. So its:
1. Chrome
2. IE8
3. Opera
4. FF
In a world where rootkits and malware infest nearly half of Windows desktops and deliver a tranparent proxy with encrypted tunnels into your precious LAN, all servers are web facing servers. The security of the firewall is a myth serious professionals no longer subscribe to, and many never did. Secure your intranet server and your desktops as if they were in your DMZ because for all practical purposes that's where they are.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
> If ActiveX was designed to create lock-in,
> why did Microsoft abandon it?
Did you SLEEP through the late nineties?
Microsoft very reluctantly abandoned ActiveX, after years of dragging their feet, only when it had long since become absolutely crystal clear that their sole other option was to claim, with a straight face, that when it comes to connecting your corporate assets to the internet, security totally doesn't matter at all. Even then they would have opted for that, if they could have come up with any kind of plan for making people believe it.
I'm not sure ActiveX was created for the purpose of generating lock-in. Perhaps they had something else in mind originally.
But I *am* reasonably sure that after it was created, Microsoft liked the fact that it created lock-in.
And EVERYONE in the industry saw how reluctant they were to abandon it, and how long it took them to finally give up and do so after every single security professional in the entire IT industry had written (often quite vehemently) about how grossly horribly irresponsible its design was.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.