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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.
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.
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.
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?