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."

Comments

This is news?

[symbolset]

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.

Re:This is news?

[Chris Lawrence]

What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired? Subordinating your business interests to the business interests of your vendor seems like a pretty stupid move, and one that should have consequences.

Re:This is news?

[TheRaven64]

Java appeared a year before ActiveX. It's not exactly a direct competitor though, because Java is a cross-platform distribution mechanism, while ActiveX is a way of packaging Windows applications for Internet distribution. To say it had no legitimate competitors is somewhat misleading, because it doesn't really have a legitimate use either. It's not a web technology, it's a Windows technology. It allows Internet Explorer to be used as a platform for easily deploying Windows binaries to workstations. There are a lot of other tools for doing that, including some quite successful ones from Novell that were widely deployed before ActiveX was introduced.

Re:This is news?

[rcw-home]

Back when it was introduced, ActiveX had no legitimate competitors.

Yes it did; the native Win32 app. IMHO most of the ActiveX-reliant applications of that day would have been better off written that way anyway. It would have been more portable because it never would have tied them to any particular browser version, and it would have been more usable, too.

Re:This is news?

[Tuidjy]

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.

Re:This is news?

[Angostura]

No - because the current server/client combination works just fine thank you - as far as they are concerned. That's one of the points made in the article.

Re:This is news?

[Chris Lawrence]

Yes, it's just fine, unless you want to move to a different server OS, or a different client OS, or a even a newer version of the *same* client OS. In other words, you've completely removed the ability for IT to make any strategic or tactical decisions. All of these problems could have been avoided with a cross-platform solution, either open source or proprietary. These alternatives did exist, and some companies used them and avoided such lock-in.

Re:This is news?

[vtcodger]

***What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired?***

I would imagine that in many cases, their question would be why YOU are still employed. They have computers. The computers do what is needed. They perceive that the IT industry -- much like American car manufacturers in the 1970s -- is creating expensive and poorly crafted junk that is little, if any, better than what they have. Change for the sake of change.

And they might be right. Refusal to engage in a Red Queen's Race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race) is not necessarily a sign of cluelessness. You might want to meditate during leisure moments about who here is actually clueless.

Re:This is news?

[shirai]

I think you'll like this song. It's about the problems MSIE developers have because of the lock in:

IE is being mean to me song

Full Disclosure: One of my employees, Scott, wrote this song (and I recorded it). The inspiration came from one of our dev teams that was constantly complaining about the problems the browser gave them.

Re:This is news?

[Gonoff]

IT departments did not generally want Windows either. That would mean replacing their nice mainframes etc with uncontrolled PCs. The idea of allowing any end user physical access to even these "toy computers" was actually popular with senior management because it put power into their hands and took it away from people they didn't understand or like.

Those managers have gone on and some will have moved much further up. I have met some who still see that move to Windows as a liberation. They see any move from certain things as a move back to the Bad Old Days!

Do not blame the IT from then. It wasn't their idea. Some were for it - some weren't. The managers were seen by MS as the way in as IT departments were not cooperative. It was just a seriously good business strategy by MS to promote themselves to the people at the top, rather than to those who actually recognised them for what they were!

But they did put a computer on every desk. It is now up to us to get those computers working right...

Re:This is news?

[Bigjeff5]

unless you want to move to a different server OS, or a different client OS, or a even a newer version of the *same* client OS.

They do not want to move to a different server OS, or client OS, or a newer version of the same client OS. That's the whole point.

You should really try working for a business that needs to actually, you know, turn a profit instead of upgrading to every shiny new system as they come out.

What an IT manager wants and what is practical is often not the same thing, and a good IT manager will develop the trust needed to steer the company toward the products and upgrades they truly need. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't bother to hire good IT managers, often outsourcing it to people who could care less, and you get stuck in situations where a company spent $10 million on a web app that only works in IE6 a year before IE7 was released. You can bet your ass that company is going to want to get more than a few years out of their $10 million investment. Ergo, no upgrade.

Re:This is news?

[Chris Lawrence]

If they really don't want to change often, and use things for a very long time, then choosing proprietary software is probably the worst choice. What do you do when support is dropped and you have a critical bug or security hole? In that case, open source is a much better option, since you can run it forever, and if you absolutely need to fix something you can.

Re:This is news?

[Jurily]

Yes, like people installing IE6.

Re:This is news?

[msoftsucks]

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.

Re:This is news?

[aztracker1]

Java was an incredibly poor performing option on the computers in the 1998-2001 timeframe though. ActiveX allowed for windows natively executing code within the browser. Though a poor solution for the most part, especially compared to native apps, since ax needed to be registered/installed anyhow. Java wasn't performant enough, and Flash wasn't yet a viable option. On release IE6 was the best browser available. That's changed, and not been the case for several years now, but I think people look back a decade ago with some skewed perspectives.

Re:This is news?

[symbolset]

On release IE6 was the best browser available.

Except that it was a trap from day one. Every serious IT pro knew it was a trap. There was no attempt made to disguise this trap: Microsoft made it quite clear that they were competing for control of the Web and they considered it an issue of corporate survival - which it was and is. They were and are completely open about the fact that they're integrating these things and interfering with open integration for the direct purpose of promoting their technologies and brands. Like I said in that first post, it's not a secret at all.

That makes it hard to weep for those who invested and still invest their own money, time and intellectual ability to skill up on these technologies and so chain themselves to the oars of Microsoft's galley, doomed to row for the benefit of a corporation that prides itself on fooling others into rowing their boat to their own detriment.

Misleading but Common

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Nah.. still all comes down to "idiocy"

[oneandoneis2]

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?"

Re:Nah.. still all comes down to "idiocy"

[Ash Vince]

For stupid corporate users, it's easy. You label the IE6 shortcut Intranet and you label the FireFox (or Opera or Safari, or whatever) shortcut Web. You configure IE to use a proxy that only goes to the Intranet and you configure the other browser to connect outside. You tell Windows to use the browser you want for the web as the default handler for http URLs.

You mean label IE7 or IE8? Very few companies are going to deploy anything other than IE on a windows platform. They just want users to use something that is familiar to them. Oh, but it is not supported by MS to have multiple versions of IE installed on the same PC so that rules this out.

Chained to IE6

[Sique]

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).

Re:Chained to IE6

[houstonbofh]

The purpose of IT is not to have the latest shiny. The purpose of IT is to support the business. If the business needs a software application that only works in IE6, than you support it. Or you tell your boss that he has to upgrade, and spend a few days playing xbox while you look for a job.

Re:Chained to IE6

[zonky]

Lets talk again when group policies are present in Firefox/Chrome?

Like it or not, for big IT, these are must haves:
Ability to specify proxy servers and prevent users from modifying them?
Ability to restrict settings, etc etc etc
Ability for Firefox to use the internal windows cert store

The problem is not that IE6 sucks, it is that there are barriers preventing Firefox/Chrome from having a place on the corporate desktop. Why they don't address these I'll never understand.

Re:Chained to IE6

[thetoadwarrior]

True but technology moves fast. The idea is to use technology that allows you to keep up and move on when required. Microsoft fucked things up by locking people in and yes it probably will be costly for some people to move on but it will cost a lot more down the line to move on.

Had people opted for open formats and open standards then it wouldn't be as much of an issue. I have no pity for companies that have their data locked behind some outdated awful MS solution. I hope it hurts their pocket book big time when they're forced to move on.

Old Standards Never Die

[lobiusmoop]

Reminds me of this old story of how the design of the Space Shuttle was influenced by the width of a horses butt

Re:Old Standards Never Die

[Anonymous Coward]

That is an urban legend.

IE6 still exists because Microsoft wanted it too

[Cassini2]

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.

Speaking as

[Dunbal]

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.

Why expect companies to "upgrade"?

[Animats]

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?

Must be compatible with IE6

[Geoff-with-a-G]

No, they are not. They might want to, but they're not FORCED to do this.

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.

Re:So why can't they..

[houstonbofh]

Because it is not fully compatible, and with some old applications it just does not work. (Mostly custom apps)

Re:Oh, come on!

[artg]

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.

They have IE6 apps, you see it everywhere

[gig]

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.

Re:chrome frame

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I just use Firefox Portable with IETab for the internal POS (not talking about point of sale folks) applications that won't work in anything but internet exploder. Oh and Hidetab comes in handy from time to time too.