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Corporate IT Just Won't Let IE6 Die
alphadogg writes "Security experts, industry analysts, and even Microsoft recommend that IT departments upgrade Internet Explorer 6, yet new research shows that while there may have recently been a mock funeral for the aging browser, IE6 is still around and doing well, especially during standard business hours." The article says that they are seeing 6-13% peaking during business hours. Around here we see less than 1.5% IE6, but since we see only 10% IE in general, I imagine we're just lucky.
but I'm working on it! The only way to get Corporate/Management off of IE6 is to fix any web apps you have in your organization that won't work on anything but that.
I'm not exactly sure at this point why we are still using IE6...for a while we were sticking with it because we were using some legacy software that required IE6 to function properly (it literally didn't work with any other version, apparently), but we no longer use that stuff, so...yeah...no idea why we are still stuck with IE6.
I can understand why we still use XP, but not IE6.
Living With a Nerd
Once the crappy internal web applications for managing some forms have been duct-taped together by a student worker, nodody dares to touch a single thing. You can only get burned.
Even though IE 6 users account for a just a small minority of users, they are often the majority of my paying customers.
You can't even install IE 6 on a new computer without jumping through millions of hoops. I'm sure some crusty old piece of lousy web app is to blame somewhere... But seriously, these IT department need to get their act together and join us in 2010.
IE6 won't die until it's more painful to stay with IE6 than to upgrade away from it. So if you want to kill IE6, that means dropping support for IE6, or if you have paying customers, charge them more if they're using IE6, and tell them that. Game! did the former ages ago.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
An analysis of the reasons corporate users were still using IE6 would have been really nice.
Is it a matter of hard-assed sysadmins locking down the system so that users can't upgrade?
Is it misguided policy?
Is it reasonable policy?
I'm sitting here typing this on Chrome and wouldn't even consider going back to IE. Why aren't these corporate users upgrading (if not to FF or Chrome, at least IE7 or 8)?
... is another Google-like IE 6 attack. I'm not saying this should happen to Google again, just another large public company. That type of press coverage is the only way to get the attention of top brass.
Many apps that run on IE 6 will not run correctly on IE 7 (not even thinking about IE8 yet). It can cost a company millions of dollars to upgrade or redevelop their proprietary applications and for what? Tabs? A fully patched IE 6 is just as secure as IE7, so why upgrade? I think many companies will skip over IE 7 and go straight to IE 8 when they upgrade machines from XP to Win7.
22% of all hits to our site are from IE6, but IE 6 users still account for something like 40% of all orders (i.e. revenue) for the site. And anytime we break anything with IE6 we hear about it quickly. This is down from about 45% of all browser hits and nearly 60% of all orders last year.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
One really big reason is there are some business software companies out there that wrote specialized applications using M$ tools that ONLY WORK in IE6. We have a huge problem with a CRM system at my company, and the vendor is very-very slow to change it. We've managed to get it to work in "Compatibility Mode" with some tweaking in IE8, but I can see why some larger companies don't want to invest the time and money in it right now. It really is ridiculous- IE6 is a pox on the Internet and NEEDS to die.
As a webdeveloper, it really sucks create sites with ie6 compatibility
Just out of curiosity, what is the browser breakdown here?
.
If you are still using I.E. 6 then you do not have "Corporate IT". Someone should go into the server room and poke the guy with a stick, and see if he moves. If not, call 911 on your rotary phone.
I have the option to visit the company website to get IE 7 installed, but like most users I never bothered. I suspect that inertia is true all across the business world - people just use whatever was given to them.
(Meanwhile back at home my ISP forces me to use IE. For some dumb reason it's the only browser that works with their web/image compression software.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
A lot of embedded devices (example, ThinClients) won't allow you to upgrade to a later version of IE. That could be a small part of the reason.
We have a crappy 3rd party system that replaced our printed paystubs. It's called MyHR. Only works with IE6, and only works with "real" Adobe PDF viewer. The only way employees can check their pay information is to use a computer at work, through a VPN Citrix session, or to have the old crap programs on their home PC.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Since it comes as default on the corporate IT build at a lot of companies, which happen to also be sticking to Windows XP. Employees, not wanting the wrath of the BOFH (IT people) stick with what's given to them.
I'm sure if IE8 / IE9 were in the corporate IT build, or IT forced the upgrades more people would be using it as a default browser, unless the person has a preference to any of the other browsers.
Some of the older websites on the company's intranet require that you use Internet Explorer. Stick with what works but have SOLID network security, that should help most of the time, except when you download bad Mcafee DAT files...
Most IT departments have their hands tied for a majority of their projects. Be it, homegrown app compatibility, budget, balancing higher priority projects, upper management or what have you. I'm not surprised by this at all. Just because a piece of software is "retired" doesn't mean everything that relies on it is. IE6 is not going away completely for a LONG time.
I'm still forced on IE5 you insenstive clod!
Usually it's IE forcing crappy standards on websites. In this case, it's crappy web design ( slashdot ) forcing itself on the browser.
Love slashdot, miss the old design that made what I'm interested in one click away.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
We are in the same state because our IT hires the cheapest vendors for any given task, and historically, they provide IE6-only web apps, like our expense management system and our Siebel ticketing system. If I even try 50% of internal web apps with a standards compliant browser, I only get a partial page or a blank page. Why not publicly humiliate the vendors who write only for IE?
The browser is no longer supported - it's dead - there will be no more security patches. This last point alone should make any "IT dept" with any common sense at all push to get a new browser in place ASAP. In fact, it should have been planned for and implemented years ago. If your management is too stupid and obstructive to allow this, get a new job - you're working for morons.
If you have some piece of garbage intranet app running, for christ's sake install a second browser for use outside of the company network. It's not hard, and there's plenty out there.
Stop being lazy hand-wringers. Do your job.
The large international company where I'm working took the step to migrate just a few weeks ago... from win2000 & IE6 to winXP & IE7... woho... NOT. Our own huge tool generated html files now are at least one order of magnitude slower, but good thing since we now run XP and developers at my company have teh seemingly rare privilege of being entrusted with Administrator rights? Chrome was able to save the day(could not install it previously as it doesn't support win2k, OK I admit I ran it still via vmware and an ubuntu image, and even with the virtual machine overhead it was faster, ha!)
We're using the security hole in IE 6 and 7 where you can execute code with IE's image parser.
Our customer comes to our office for a meeting where he demands IE 6 & 7 support. We tell him to open his laptop and go to google.com. When downloading the google logo image we have configured our router to redirect to our infected image file.
Then we tell our customer to reboot. After the reboot we tell him to check his mail inbox in outlook and then tell us what the new mail he has says.
He gets really suprised when he sees his login password in clear text. And from that moment IE8 is a minimum requirement.
This works on every customer we have tried it on, they take it seriously when they see the security threat in action. Most people think anti-virus and firewalls protects them. Our job is to tell them that updated software also protects them, and we've failed bigtime when it comes to that.
Rotary phone! You're lucky to have a rotary phone! In our office, all we use for communication are large, heavy, stone tablets. When our CEO goes overseas for meetings, we have a team carrying the Ark of Covenant containing all the contracts carved in stone. THAT, and IE6, is what a company with a long and glorious history should be using. You little startups need to get off our lawn.
We have several instances of a third party document management system that only runs on IE6. Apparently the new version has a Fire Fox plug-in, but getting everyone to upgrade to the new version is like pulling teeth. For the short term I would be happy if I could convince our users to use IE6 just for that application and Fire Fox with Ad-Block for everything else.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
And it is CONTINUING because IE6 is on all the desktops.
The old apps require IE6 ... ... ... IE6.
The new apps need to be written to the "standard"
That "standard" is
So guess what is going to be around for a LONG time.
like our expense management system and our Siebel ticketing system
OK #1 Siebel.
Who does your expense mgt system?
So, guys, when there's supposed to be input for IT purchases, Siebel systems are off the table for being security and liability risks for the enterprise.
Let's get this going and kill IE6.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Google is being very forward-thinking now. My dad got a new laptop, with IE 8 pre-installed. The homepage is iGoogle, which shows news articles -- that don't work when you click on them! He brought it over for me to "fix."
Suggestions? Yes, you in the back? (mumble mumble) Oh, good idea.
Yes, I installed Firefox, replaced his pinned icon (Windows 7) and told him to use that instead. Problem solved, one less IE user, so when IE 8 is the black sheep (8-10 years from now?), we'll have one less user to migrate.
let ie6 only access the intranet and the applications inside the company it is needed for
you don't even have to inspect packets for HTTP_USER_AGENT, no such filtering or gatekeeping nonsense at a network level: since you control the employee's desktop, just lock ie6 out programmatically. lock it down by subnet filter and make the property read only so savvier employees can't change it. employees get used to using two browsers: one for outside access, one for legacy apps
thus you decouple the legacy app argument from the security argument. win win. now you can keep ie6 inhouse for years if you have to. just don't let it peek outside
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The company I work for is begrudgingly moving to IE8 starting a couple weeks from now. The only reason they are moving to it is because they are also starting to role out Windows 7, and IE6 isn't available for Windows 7.
Therefore they have had no choice but to go through all of the internal sites and fix the numerous ones that only support IE6. Which was the only thing holding them back from pushing IE7/8 onto the XP machines. The good side effect of this is that for the most part all of the internal sites that have been upgraded to support IE8 also support Firefox now.
...will be browsers like Firefox and Opera that have been set to report themselves as being IE6 just so corporate websites will let them on.
Isn't the corollary of this that businesses are sticking with XP too?
Until a company gives you sign-off for using IE7/8 with their application, they basically say "No, don't upgrade". The problem is when you have a set of users who can do 90% of their work without IE6 but still need that 10%, how can you convert them over? You can't.
Managers don't push so hard about IE6 because they simply don't care. If it works, they don't want to bother with it. I have managed to upgrade about 50% of our users but now I'm stuck because the rest of our users have issues with IE7/8. Hell, I upgraded our users to IE7 because some vendors won't even sign off on THAT.
The simple fact is that management pushes applications that are cheap and crappy (this is rather universal) and then IT is stuck with the job of supporting them and ensuring they work. They start to build business processes around these horrible applications, and then find later down the road that the cost of conversion to a better, more useful piece of software (that probably is better coded and works in IE8 because it's more standards-aware) will cost many times over what the initial cost of the system implementation was. But do they care? No -- they bill it back to the business side, while they collect bonuses year to year about how great a job they did that ONE year. It's not about ROI, it's about one year results that you can pin a medal to.
This is the inherent problem with corporate IT as a whole. Read this article and you'll see what I mean: http://infoworld.com/print/108477
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I've been working in an environment where a WSUS server is supposed to be pushing updates down. Users complained about SP3 taking too long, so they delayed it and forgot. Now were getting attacked by viruses left and right because of old vulnerabilities. The users ignored the update and now theyre falling further and further behind, and the WSUS wont push them any other updates.
Im assuming the remaining IE6 users just dont know any better or aren't being forced to update.
I love how this is always said like it is a sign of a failed IT dept. We still run IE6, we have to for more than one essential business apps that will not run in any other browser. Because of buyouts upgrades are not possible and we aren't given any funds for anything but keeping things barely running. Sure, it sucks, in a perfect world, we'd have been long off of it. Eliminating positions (mine included) and the current state of the economy on many businesses make this a pretty minor issue as far as those in power are concerned. That's the reality of IT for many. Sad but true.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
It's just a matter of time until some trojan, virus, or whatever appears in the wild that can get through (or specifically targets) IE6 after it's no longer supported my MS, yes? At what point is it more cost-effective to upgrade to something newer? Before or after something like this happens and guts out your intranet, folks? Really...
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might use standard HTML or CSS.
Unfortunately, not all the people using IE6 are customers trying to access shopping sites.
The non-profit I work receives a pile of grant money from several state and local governments, and because of this, we are required to submit grant activity data back to the sources. Guess which browser their reporting sites demand?
One of the state agencies actually has a couple of sites that we're required to use, and both are developed on the same floor in the same building by two guys who sit less than twelve feet apart. One guy's site will run run in IE8 and Firefox without problems, the other guy's will only run in IE6.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
I don't know if it has been said already, but the Navy/Marine Corps Internet runs IE6. So everyone in the US Navy and Marine Corps runs IE6. Pain in the a$$ for a lot of websites.
I work for the USMC and all computers on our network run only IE6.
I just approved the upgrade from IE6 to IE8 using WSUS yesterday. It feels good to get that done...
We track our users' browser versions, something started in response to a VP who tried to use Safari at home and couldn't make it work. Well, actually, he didn't try any of the workarounds he paid for, but that's another story.
While we get an unusual mix of browsers hitting the site I work with the most, IE is the overwhelming favorite, almost even shared of 7 & 8, with 6 a small fraction. Firefox is growing but still less than 10%, Safari hangs in there at about 1%, and Opera started getting hits. Android makes an appearance - that would be me doing some ad hoc testing... and it's not good, but this is pretty heavy Java site, so I expect my G1 to gag on it.
But we get calls from users complaining we don't support Firefox better, and they universally claim that Firefox is the dominant browser out there and we MUST SUPPORT IT OR OUR SITE WILL DIE.
Um, no, it won't. But I digress.
We have problems with IE8, primarily because of the JVM and the underlying architecture. So this is an issue that is getting significant development funding.
Problem is, our team rightly points out that there are things we need to do that will essentially kill IE6 browsers. And they have early reports that IE9 will require more work, and within this development cycle. We need to be working to make sure IE9 doesn't break anything, while updating to support IE8 better, and then abandoning IE6. And probably breaking some old Fierfox versions. And seeing if we can realistically support Safari to some reasonable extent without coding some sections three times for different browsers. And answering the VP who's kid claims that Opera will rule the world in 2 years. And completing some work to finish the AJAX implementation and get off of ASP. And face a server platform upgrade just as this all comes to production, without any definitive statements from the sever team on what will change, what the JVM will look like, what the actual server will be, and what will break. FWIW, we use a Websphere/Apache platform. It has its moments, like paying Development $2000 to have the copyright date changed on the home page. It will cost us more to get the date fixed on all the pages. So the budget for working on 40+ features, including PDF reporting, spreadsheet-like report pages that may encompass >30,000 rows at >200 rows per page allowed, querying local and remote SQL tables and DB2 tables, all within a corporate single signon environment, is substantial. And add to this browser compatability.
And the problem is that Microsoft seems bent on new browser releases every 2 years. Our current major release cycle is a little more than 2 years, and will be, because this site provides critical information to literally millions of users. Accuracy and reliability is more important than new features. Browser compatability has to be fourth place at best.
But to hear a few vocal users, we are not just behind the curve, we are criminally negligent, and risking their data and systems by forcing them to use 'obsolete' browsers. IE7 is obsolete?
And yes, we also have security concerns. So much so that we broke much of the site in a campaign to further harden the systems agains SQL injection attacks. But in this case, security before functionality was the corporate mission, so we have had an interesting few months. We only have one major patch to complete, and it will only take coordinated and cooperative effort from virtually all of a multi-billion dollar enterprise, of which some groups have stated the changes will not be made because it will break their systems. For the record, their systems are already 'broken', they just don't realize the impact to other systems. The message is being delivered this month, which is what they said last month. Or was it last year... These things tend to blur...
It's all well and good to point out that you should be updating your systems to accomodate current browsers. How about sporting over a few million to cover that, ok? And maybe generating a time
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My company has almost 12k pcs, and almost all of them use IE6. I've yet to figure out why, since we've just last month been given MS Office 2007 or 8 (I forget, whatever gave us the "ribbon"). Well, considering also that our main corp-wide inventory (QAD) is dos based, I guess I'm not surprised.
Install FireFox, Install IE Tab, set IE Tab to automatically switch to IE for intranet apps (I set a filter for www.mycompany.com). Problem solved. Crappy corporate webapps still work and I can browser the wider internet with the extra security of FireFox.
Why is it that some people go to IE7 after IE6? IE8 has been out for a long time and is very stable.
IE7 is almost as bad as IE6.... Not quite as bad in terms of quirkiness and general fail, but still quirky.
Seriously, most corporate IT doesn't need IE 7.. or 8.. or any future version of IE, just like they don't need more than office 98 and windows 2000. The newer software packages require newer hardware, costing money upon money to keep everything upgraded.. and for what? new help features?... oh wait.. security.. we wrote our shit so badly and it has soo many holes in it you have to pay US AGAIN to fix our shit.
The only way to get Corporate/Management off of IE6 is to fix any web apps you have in your organization that won't work on anything but that.
No, try Citrix and/or VMWare.
Users get a nice little link on their desktop to run IE6, it launches on a controlled machine somewhere which can only access crappy old corporate sites.
You get to upgrade everyone to IE8 (or whatever) and you don't have to upgrade every unmaintained/forgotten webapp out there.
I agree. Most companies (like the one I work for) only look at the EOL date for the product they are using. They will run it into the ground until they see the EOL for it on the horizon. At that point they will begin assessing what actions they need to take to upgrade the browsers and the applications.
For this reason many companies are still using Windows XP. There is going to be alot of computers/OS bought here in the coming months as companies are forced to upgrade.
The EOL for Windows XP (and thus IE6) is July 13, 2010. The end is nigh.
it's not as simple as recoding a few websites. we run an old version of Cognos with a SQL server backend. looking into upgrading it because we have too much data for it now. this version of cognos requires some build of IE6
new version of Cognos is $70,000 or more if you haven't been paying support. from what i've read it doesn't support SQL server anymore so we're not sure if we need a separate license for DB2 or Informix. then there is the issue of migrating the cubes.
SQL 2008 R2 will cost us $30,000 including the hardware. and there is still the issue of months of work of recreating all the cubes.
multply this by all the other software that companies run that they don't pay annuall support for that will need a business case for an upgrade
If all those legacy systems would be OSS, companies could upgrade them to support browsers.
I work in IT for a government department that is still using IE6 as well. We are actually transitioning to IE8 this very month, the standard laptop/desktop build is being overhauled.
So, these things take a lot of time, but they do get done.
It should be noted that the "study" was conducted by the advertising network Chitika (quoted, because the mentioned "study" was probably just running AWStats or Webalizer against Chitika's own access logs). The unfortunate problem with this is that most, if not all modern browsers have the ability to utilize ad blocking solutions. When an ad is blocked, I belive that usually means your browser isn't even requesting the ad. You won't show up in their access logs. Browser-based analysis will be skewed.
That being said, my assumptions about ad blocker proliferation may be overly ambitious.
Spork.
P.S. Spork.
On web development jobs, I charge my clients a 50% premium if they want IE6 support.
And then let the sexual harassments lawsuits rain in on these backwards businesses that force their stuff to surf with such an explicit browser.
Should be phun to watch.
from a couple of young military officers walking down the corridor in a headquarters facility I once worked in:
"I don't mind change, as long as I don't have to do anything different or learn anything new."
That, pretty much, explains why IE6 persists.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
. . . but it broke a mission-critical web app and they had to roll it back to IE6. Since more and more sites aren't bothering to target IE6 anymore, I've installed Chrome and use that for everything but that one stupid web app.
How about Microsoft releasing IE6 source code after it lets it die out, so interested users can go about patching it where possible (if they're so inclined)? If M$ refuses to provide assistance to IE6, it basically renounces to income related to it. Nevertheless, I expect them to deny it, because a source of revenue would be the "support" for the upgrade.
My sig is better than your sig.
Our company switched to Cisco IP phones from an aspect phone system back when IE7 was just coming out. I don't know how much our company saved, but those who knew said it was a lot. The only limitation now is that the client software can only be installed on a system running IE6. Here is the field notice stating the issue. That means that we are stuck with Windows XP unless our company pays Cisco about $300,000 to upgrade their software. There is no problem with upgrading to IE7 or IE8 after the fact, but the client software can only be installed or reinstalled with IE6. All of the web based applications that we use work fine with IE7 and IE8. Unless my company has to start using some software that won't work on Windows XP, they are not going to spend the money on the upgrade.
"I see. The fact that you . . . can't explain . . . explains everything."
Many have posted about the legacy apps that will cost incredible amounts of money to update for anything but IE6. OK, fine. Nobody is saying you can't keep IE6 around, just treat it as your shameful family secret and don't let the rest of the world see it. Nobody cares if you keep using IE6 internally for the next century if that's what you really want, just keep it in the basement.
When you want to talk to the rest of the world, use a real browser.
A word of advice though, keep in mind that even MS has given up on backward compatibility with anything that touches IE6. Newer versions of IE, even with compatibility modes don't work. You're going to have to upgrade those lame ducks sooner or later or you'll discover that you have no legal way forward at all one day. Then you can either join the ranks of the pirates and hope the BSA shock troops don't come around or update all your apps at once.
But again, the rest of us here in the 21st century don't care much as long as we don't have to look at it.
...a browser with many known security issues being used daily by users to browse general sites. Oh - our PCs are still XP SP2 as well (which means I can't upgrade to VS2010 grrrr!!!)...
As a justifiably paranoid developer I still find it shocking! :-(
I run a large website in the financial sector. About 30k visits per day from "normal people", not techies:
IE----75.34%
Firefox----17.49%
Safari----4.00%
Chrome----2.35%
Within IE:
8.0----61.29%
7.0----23.50%
6.0----15.19%
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Earlier this year, after 3 years of trying to convince management, I used WSUS to upgrade over 1000 workstations from IE6 to IE7. Before they would say I couldn't do it because people needed it. Who needs it? For what? Dunno, but I think something doesn't work in anything else so we have to use it. OK...
I brought it up regularly, every time there was a spyware infection, every time someone bitched that the interwebs didn't look right. It took two years to convince them to "officially" support Firefox, I got at least 70% of the users to switch over. They would never agree to IE7 though.
Finally, this year: "Huh? Sure, whatever... everyone uses that Foxfire thing now"
Progress!
There is a cost to upgrading the corporate intranet, and there is a cost to being owned by industrial spies and spam botnets.
Executives will upgrade when the cost of the one exceeds the cost of the other. Or otherwise, the company will eventually lose enough money and die.
They learned Pavlov-style not to want anything better.
Not to want standards but what M$ threw at them.
To bark "yep" when they said M$ has lower TCO.
To pursue and bite those who want F/OSS.
And, I suppose, to lay on their backs waiting for a pat on their bellies.
It won't be easy to teach new tricks for such a well-trained dog.
Now, what do we do with IT?
Didn't we warn IT and designers to NOT design web apps & sites to be IE only? Didn't we strongly recommend following standards as closely as possible and testing in multiple browsers? Didn't we encourage developing cross platform? I know I did. But did they listen? No... Our company is now migrating to IE7 (individuals have been using Firefox for years already) and crap is breaking all over the place. It's really quite funny. Serves 'em right for not doing it properly in the first place. Whenever something doesn't work and I have to put in a ticket with corp. IT, I include a link to the W3C. Corporate IT is just as stupid now as they were back in the IBM days. Different players, same problems.
Simple solution. ;)
Wait for MS to simply not offer IE6 anymore. Done.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
But do they care? No -- they bill it back to the business side, while they collect bonuses year to year about how great a job they did that ONE year. It's not about ROI, it's about one year results that you can pin a medal to.
There is something wrong with that short-term mentality too, but that is a different but related matter.
I'm a web analyst at a rather large company. Our web properties see well over 10M visits a month, and IE 6 ranks 4th for us at just over 8.0% of overall traffic.
IE 8
FF 3.6
IE 7
IE 6
FWIW.
IE 6 is going to be around for awhile and there's nothing you can do about it. Some of you are going to have to support it because your boss tells you too. I'm sure it's not the only thing your boss tells you to do that you'd rather not. That's why they call it work.
It's what is making me look for a new job.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
no other way to say it:
LOL!!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
...it is a LEGACY CLIENT APPLICATION.
You don't have to go as far as making people connect to a terminal server IMO but I think you've got the right idea. Basically treat IE6 as what it now really is: a proprietary, lecagy client application. IE6 == 5250 terminal emulator is as charitable as you should get...in any case an enterprise app that uses IE6 (and no later version) is a proprietary, legacy application no different from those other old, early client-server systems with pre-WWW proprietary client apps.
Some corporate setups do indeed put legacy/proprietary apps on a Citrix or terminal services server te ease administration and deployment. Others deploy client emiages with pre-configured setups and the client app or terminal emulator runs locally. In any case IE6 should NO LONGER be considered a WEB browser, so configure it as it should be: Legacy client. Use Group Policy to lock down IE6 to only your intranet servers that require IE6. Then deploy Firefox since you cannot *reliably* install multiple IE versions on one computer, and set it to the default browser and make sure in no uncertain terms that users know Firefox IS "the internet". Remove the generic "big blue E" and only put shortcut(s) that open IE to the required lecgacy app(s) (bonus if you can change the icon to something else so as not to confuse users who think "big blue E" == internet).
I wish this was the strategy corporate IT would've taken. Not only would it be more secure than letting user's browse the public WWW with IE6, it would erode IE's market share even faster and really light a fire under Ballmer's butt.
Make internal users to have to use a proxy to access internet sites, and block in the proxy configuration external requests from IE6 user agent. That way they could still use IE6 for internal applications that require it, and force them to use another browser to access internet.
Nice detail: even the latest HTC Windows Mobile phone still runs Internet Explorer 6.
Why did they use the IE6 engine? Why! Why!
Has the ancient art of dialing numbers by tapping the "hook" been lost?
No sig today...
Some of those still using IE 6 are forced to by virtue of decree by Microsoft: If you're among those hangers on to Windows 2000, Microsoft won't let you upgrade to IE 7 or higher even if you want to. Which isn't to suggest sticking with Win2k is necessarily advisable, but guaranteed that's one of the reasons some are still using IE 6...
Why does anyone care what version of a browser someone is using? Just put the text in the file, and they can see it. Images still work ok, so do tables. If the something is a few pixels off, so what?
No, but you can install chrome and FF on a machine with ie6.
I suppose you also want to "take back" porch monkey. O_o
Put identity in the browser.
Some of us simply don't have the option to upgrade IE6. As much as I would love to deploy new computers on our production floor, the boss won't let me spend the money unless it's absolutely necessary since they're only used for one task. Therefore, those computers get upgraded when it becomes absolutely necessary and not until then. Of course, they also have the Internet blocked for most of the day :)
Start from the top and you can reverse this stat for entire countries
The number of internet users for each country was obtained from here
wait till see corporate IT hang onto XP.
www.scoutwalker.com is the porn you speak of
No such problem with the next generation. I run a site mainly used by teens and our stats are: IE 45%, Firefox 35%, Safari 9%. Chrome, Opera and others make up the rest. Within IE we have: IE 8: 70%, IE 7: 26%, IE 6: 4%.
Since you are mixing methods it's like the following approach to a drive in bottleshop.
You drive there (browser) and get out of the car leaving the keys in the ignition. You have to get out of the car to walk into the unattended bottleshop (changing to CIFS) to see anything but you can see everything, open doors the the staff area, take what you like and leave the money on the counter.
Everything is fine so long as everyone is honest.
The problem here is the big bad net showed us a couple of decades before IE existed that not everyone is honest and even if you are miles off the highway bad dudes can come into town and rip everyone off that depends on an honesty box.
You can get away with it, can save time and the consequences of failure can be low but it's definitely not something to be proud of.
According to a developer of web apps I asked, it is not perfect but a lot better than IE6 (I'm using SeaMonkey myself, so I would not know ;-).
Corporate IT could roll out IE7 and keep XP otherwise. Or if they want to be a bit more radical, a recent version of Firefox. Of course that may require fixing some wep apps, but you don't need Windows 7 to get off IE6.
C - the footgun of programming languages
We have a Cisco VoIP system. To allow some users to login to a call center type app, I have to install a bit of software on their computer. For reasons known only to themselves, who ever wrote this POS decided to make the installer download most of the component parts of the program, and to do this they leveraged some IE6 components. I only discovered this when trying to install said app on a machine that was already upgraded to IE7, whereupon it failed with the helpful error "Component missing". Turns out that unless IE6 is the only version of IE on a system, the app won't install (it will run after an upgrade fortunately). We've just bought some new PCs with Win7 on, and I've had to get XP Mode working just to install this bloody application. Yes, our shiny new PCs have to run a whole XP virtual machine, because some idiot at cisco couldn't be bothered to just write a normal installer (or one that used IE in a way that was compatible with IE7-8). aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnddddddd relax. Rant over.
then power to opera/safari/chrome/firefox: the first one who tries to be corporate friendly wins a big market
however, i think firefox is pretty customizable. hell some third party could corporatize firefox all by itself
so somebody: go make some corporate cash locking down firefox for the point and click admins!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
so power to opera/ firefox/ safari/ chrome, whomever first stands behind a supported warrantied corporate customizable browser
probably chrome, because of the google cachet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...that just UPGRADED to IE 6.
*headdesk*
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.