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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.
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.
But... isn't using IE6 in a corporate environment the equivalent of saying, "Yes, please infect my computers with malware without warning!"? That's not even to touch matters of compatibility... Doesn't security mean anything? And wouldn't most IE6 web apps work in IE8 under its compatibility mode... or am I being overly optimistic about said compatibility mode?
Go poke the CIO instead. That's where the buck stops.
An IT department can make all the technical cases it want to. However, until the equation of $$$StandStill is less than $$$Moveforward, $$$StandStill is where you'll be.
And no, the CIO is almost never a technical weenie. It's just another seat on the board, with fat shareholder priviledges.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
No, it's equivalent to saying "We need to run mission-critical software that won't run on higher versions of IE."
I've actually had to go around uninstalling IE 7 and 8 from user machines and re-installing IE 6 because the users have to run IE6-only software, or the vendor's IE7 installer doesn't work, or there are bugs in the IE 7 version, etc. etc. Sure, I'd love to get rid of the vendor -- you think that's easy?
Of course, I also encourage people to do any *ahem* personal browsing in Firefox anyway, but IE6 isn't going to go away until we don't need it. If the web-designer artistes out there want to complain about cross-browser compatibility, they can either bite me, or come down and do my users' jobs for them.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
It's because of familiarity, I'm pretty sure. I've had clients absolutely refuse to use anything else, even IE8, because it "felt" (in other words, looked) different from what they were used to. My solution to this is usually one of the Firefox themes that makes Firefox look like IE. The IE6 one is pretty flawless.
If a client cares about that more than all of the problems with IE6, then they should not have a position in their company that allows them to make IT-related decisions.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I realize this probably wasn't your fault in the first place, but it *is* your company's own fault. Eventually, Microsoft *will* stop supporting IE6 (XP is supposed to go out of support in a few years, and there's no IE6 for Vista or 7). Those millions of dollars *will* have to be spent. Why not start working on it now and spread the pain out. All of this "but it will cost us million of dollars to make our stuff work like it should have in the first place!" whinging by various corporate managers kind of ridiculous. You (not you personally, but generically "you IT managers") know they won't support this stuff forever, you could fix this over time and spend very little quarter by quarter, but you'd rather cry about the million of dollars it will cost all at once when you eventually HAVE to deal with it.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Exactly. Anyone who's had to deal with trying to get an internal development organization to update anything knows how painful it can be. Absent a clear and urgent need expressed from corporate executive management, they'll put your concerns on the back burner forever, especially if they also develop for external paying clients. So, if you have a tool that's only used internally, updates to that tool can take many months or even years to get done. Meanwhile, the poor downtrodden IT guys have to support the ancient monstrosity the whole company depends on but no one wants to spend the time or money updating because it doesn't immediately generate revenue. Thus, we get stuck with IE6 years beyond when it should have been retired.
Now that's a good idea. You should post your infected image code, I'm sure people would love to do the same thing internally.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I just HOPE that in the future, development teams will fucking stick to standards!
Microsoft sold senior management on a series of rapid application development tools that allowed developers to write very effective applications very quickly. Rational companies use the most effective tool to solve a business problem, and in a lot of heavy-Microsoft shops those tools were FrontPage, SQL Server, Visual(insert language here), and the rest of the Microsoft development suite that was almost free once you drank the whole glass of kool-aid, Cherry Redmond flavor.
I don't think in all fairness that anyone could have predicted that Microsoft would not only break compatibility with other browsers, but also break compatibility with their own. The fact remains that a lot of software written with Microsoft toolkits from the IE6 era will only run on IE6. There is no IE6 compatibility mode in any meaningful sense of the term, and there is no "take the source code, shove it into this tool, recompile, now you're IE7+ compatible!" magic bullet, even when you have the original source code and the latest Microsoft tools. It requires recoding. Long, tedious, manual recoding.
As far as external vendor software goes, hell, "follows Web standards" isn't even on the RFP checklist at many companies now, and it certainly wasn't back then. The "standard" was Microsoft, because that's what everyone ran. If you could write your software more cheaply by using an ActiveX widget, so be it. That's what you did. And Microsoft will always support this stuff, because that's what they do, right?
The business shops around for the software that best solves the problem they have at the lowest price they can get away with. IT might get involved to make sure it works with the back-end systems, but very few people care too deeply about the desktop.
Tons and tons of companies used those tools to write applications for their internal use and also for sale to other companies. Then Microsoft came out with IE7 and basically told all of those developers that their applications would need to be almost completely rewritten.
Development teams will fucking stick to standards, but they are the standards of the company they work for, and last I checked IEEE doesn't run most companies unless I missed the global memo about the planetary business reorganization.
I'm just glad I never got into desktop application development. Writing useful programming is a whole lot easier on the midrange field, because my apps run on a single box, and I don't give a rat's ass what version of telnet you use to access my apps as long as it supports the 5250 function keys. I'm free to think about functionality, performance, security, and stability. I don't deal with desktop compatibility and what shade of cerulean the "Accept" button needs to be.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
It's mostly due to the relationship between the IT staff and the regular employees. In some situations, IT can dictate quite a bit and is left to make their own decisions about security, but in most situations they are essentially the servants of the employees - someone to clean malware off of their computers and be whined at. If the employee(s) doesn't/don't want IE6, then it's harder for IT to make a case to management (since they could otherwise claim that the employees also want an upgrade) to justify upgrading, and most just won't bother unless there's lots of user demand. If the users are against it, it takes either a somewhat reckless IT dept. or a tech-savvy manager to realize that this stuff needs to get done.
A hypothetical: if my doctor told me that there was a very good medical reason for me to do something, I would follow his advice. I guess you could say that doing what he tells me I should do makes me a "servant" except that he doesn't have a way to force me to do anything. I can realize on my own that it's in my interests to follow the advice he gives me and that I probably don't have the expertise it would take to seriously dispute him.
Or I could ignore my doctor's hypothetical advice. Since I am paying/hiring him, I can think of him as my "servant" and insist that he never tell me anything I don't want to hear, especially those things that would suggest I should change my lifestyle or otherwise adapt to something new. I can freely ignore any such advice and take the attitude of "what does he care, he got paid." I could do that, but ignoring the sound advice of an expert in his field who is trying to look out for you is generally unwise.
On the one hand, if you expect users to understand and be able to follow basic procedures without making silly errors they tell you things like "but I'm not a computer expert, I just want it to work!" On the other hand, when you present them with a real computer expert they will ignore his advice the second it means they might lose a pretty icon or a shiny button. So they are like my second hypothetical situation. They neither wish to become experts nor listen to existing experts.
Name one other profession or trade or area of expertise where expert advice is so routinely ignored for such trivial reasons. It doesn't happen with doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics or insurance agents. "If the users are against it" their ability to understand the full implications of their decision and their background in IT should be considered first and foremost. If not, why don't we have such "mob rule" in all the other departments of major corporations? I'm sure most users would like a $300k/yr raise too, so does that mean Accounting is obligated to accommodate them?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I beg to differ. I give out medical advice all day, things that are PROVEN to improve your life, decrease your risk of death, and people blissfully ignore it all the time. Stop smoking, get more exercise, watch your diet are just a few of the most popularly ignored pieces of advice. So if people can ignore advice designed to save their lives, why are we surprized that they ignore advice to save their computers?