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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.
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.
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.
Just out of curiosity, what is the browser breakdown here?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
What if you just didn't use their crappy software?
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.
I work as a consultant in a 5000 users company where the ONLY standard is IE6. The reason why we're stuck here is because mainly of poor development practices, using non W3C compliant standards to develop in house web applications that rely on IE6 proprietary features.
The only way to get rid of it is to put a LOT of resources (see money) on making our in house apps standards compliant. The problem is that the developpers do not have the budget necessary because the top company managers (non tech) say "Hey, we can browse the web with IE6? So no money until it does not work anymore!"
I just HOPE that in the future, development teams will fucking stick to standards!
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.
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.
One part resistance to change, two parts stupidity, three parts laziness, one part cheapness (don't want to dedicate time to testing and rolling out a major upgrade), and three parts apathy on the part of everyone.
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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.
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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.
The upgrade process is a pain, but it's starting to hurt the company's ability to buy NEW software. We've already face a problem at work where IT now has to allow IE7 on some desktops or Citrix servers. IE6 was such an evil product that Microsoft unleashed on the world, and even Microsoft, I think, realises they're getting hurt by it too. What I wish was there was a painless way of installing IE6 as a separate special browser while the default browser is something better. Oh, funny addendum: the Software Standards & Licensing nazis sent out a sniffer to figure out what people had installed in their desktops, and tried to get us web developers to uninstall Firefox and stick to IE6. HAHA! We develop web apps facing the outside world, as we explained to them. Unless you want 80% of your traffic to stop working, we're keeping Firefox. Then, just to make it more interesting, the corporate web czar sent a note out to all us web developers to start installing and testing against other browsers like Opera and Safari. X-D Left hand, meet the Right hand.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
On web development jobs, I charge my clients a 50% premium if they want IE6 support.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
Like I said, as an indy web developer, I don't have that issue. If I were working for a PHB things would be different. As an indy consultant I would give off what I've done to a sub-contractor to fill in for the IE6 compatibility issues, as an employee of the company I would seek out someone with the skills to make it IE6 compatible. My focus is on W3C compliance, then style, then backwards compatibility with broken and ancient tech (IE6, for example). I still have a place in my heart for dial-up users, though. All my personal sites have a load time of under 10 seconds.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)