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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Oh but you forget the joys of virtualization. IE6 can live forever in a VM. Enterprises can go for the next 20 years forcing their workers to use something that barely worked and was horrible even when the tech was current. I know there are people out there virtualizing Netware and NT4 which I fully expect to be doing some critical operations inside a VM like controlling machinery or whatever 100 years from now. I doesn't have to die, even though it probably should die.
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."
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.