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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.
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.
Simple it is Microsoft's fault.
Actually this time it really is.
Microsoft decided to and all sorts of stuff to IE and to ignore web standards. They produced web authoring tools that generated code that only worked with IE. And they encouraged other companies to do the say. Their Partners.
They did this because they wanted people to be locked into the Microsoft Ecosystem. You can not move off of Windows because some of your software will stop working! Microsoft feared and fears web apps to this day because of that idea.
Web and software developers bought into this because "everybody used IE" and since you had to make your stuff work for IE anyway why spend time making it work for Netscape, then Mozilla? I mean why worry for say 2% of the population and most of those people had IE anyway so they could always just use IE instead!
Now that Microsoft has to move to following standards and now frankly that the standards have gotten much better. W3C your too freaking slow! Microsoft is breaking a lot of it's old stuff.
So people are sticking with IE6 because many of them are trapped by their large investment in old apps.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Google Chrome Frame -- it allows web developers to stick a modern engine into IE on a site-by-site basis.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This may not directly apply to you, you might not have been there at the time, but:
Remember last century when a whole pile of GNU hippie types warned you that MS was trying to lock you in and you should make sure your apps comply with web standards and work with other browsers? Remember how they said you'd be very sorry one day if you didn't? Remember how you laughed off their concerns and said MS would never leave you in the lurch that way and it would all be fine? How surely MS would provide a painless upgrade path? Well, <exclamation voice=Nelson Muntz">HA ha!</exclamation>.
Might want to listen more closely next time someone says vendor lock-in is expensive.
You might also want to start saving the corporate nickels and dimes since IE6 isn't going to get any more available. It won't run in Windows7 and I doubt MS will make XP available forever. Flag day is coming and if you haven't upgraded by then and don't have those millions available, you'll just have to shut down.