UK Government Rejects Calls To Upgrade From IE6

pcardno writes "The UK government has responded to a petition encouraging government departments to move away from IE6 that had over 6,000 signatories. Their response seems to be that a fully patched IE6 is perfectly safe as long as firewalls and malware scanning tools are in place, and that mandating an upgrade away from IE6 will be too expensive. The second part is fair enough in this age of austerity (I'd rather have my taxes spent on schools and hospitals than software upgrade testing at the moment), but the whole reaction will be a disappointment to the petitioners." Update: 07/31 11:43 GMT by S : Dan Frydman, the man who launched the petition, has posted a response to the government's decision.

Comments

Frosty Pizzo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Methinks! Oh, and IE6 is terrible. But then again, so are IE7 and IE8.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet itself has become terrible.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[91degrees]

What's so bad about IE 8? I've not used it much but it seems quite usable.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[Tubal-Cain]

Opera is far more configurable.
Firefox plugins leave Opera's configurability in the dust.
Chrome's interface is cleaner and more compact.
Only mobile and cli browsers score lower on Acid3.
Everything else runs circles around IE's rendering times.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Al 3 are terrible to program for:

IE6 was a disaster,
IE7 was a disaster too, only a few things were better.
With IE8 it is much better, but it still doesn't support anything interesting. Like round corners, scrollable tbody-tags.

And as long as people are still using XP, IE9 is not interesting at all, just another extra browser, that costs extra in development time...

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[digitig]

It broke a fully W3C compliant website I'm responsible for, which had worked fine under earlier versions and all the other browsers I'd tested it under, from Lynx to Chrome, a couple of days before we were due to go live. We had to postpone launch, because it was an automatic update and we thought we'd get the blame, not MS.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[SirRedTooth]

Indeed. How hard can it be for a multi-billion pound company to make a browser that follows W3C rules. It really is beyond me how IE can fail so badly.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[Hognoxious]

90% of everything is terrible.

Except Ivan.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[Anonymous Coward]

It needs more cowbell.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[FuckingNickName]

anything interesting. Like round corners

And this is why the web has become a mess of eye-candy. I wish IE6's lack of modern shiny had forced producers to focus more on content, but no, it causes them to spend months figuring every hack possible to get things looking pointlessly pixel-perfect.

I still am caught several times a day by a broken back button because some dolt has decided it's okay to implement navigation by only reloading part of the page. And then there's the sites where parts appear in random order over the course of a minute, often not completing entirely, because some hipster decided it would be all Web 2.0 to make 50 small requests. And does that menu really need to animate itself into place over the text I'm reading? Oh, and I want to know when a link is a link so stop disguising them and making me guess.

If you want to inform my mind of how to view your content, just make an interactive PDF. It'll then be easier for me to know to ignore your site. I hate Facebook but I've learnt that Facebook is popular because it's fairly predictable and uniform - once you've browsed one person's page you can browse a hundred million pages without spending time re-learning navigation.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[tibit]

Reloading part of the page is fine, it's just that the dolt has no clue as to how to make it interoperate with the back button.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[GarryFre]

True, and for the group to be stuck in the stone ages with IE6 is ... fascinating. And at the same time they have produced all this advanced weaponry and satellites to watch others. Shows where the priorities are at.

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[tomhudson]

Maybe it doesn't support rounded corners, but now that all the major crap has been fixed, I'll do my rounded corners with a few css background: (url://foo.com/round.png) and call it good.

I can now do web sites entirely within linux, boot a laptop temporarily into windows, and guess what - it WORKS.

I don't need any browser sniffing, any shims, any of the crap that people have been using for years. xmlhttprequest is the same object across all browsers now so no checking for different methods for creating a new one.

THAT is what we've been asking for for a decade.

Now as for this:

Most creative and software development companies are forced by government department clients to build websites for IE6 when most of the industry has moved on.

Nobody is forced - you can always give them a separate url with a fugly site and tell them that it's to partition off the insecure users of IE6. Bring along a laptop to show them what they're missing. Tell them they don't have to upgrade from IE6 - they can always use Opera or Forefox in addition ... it's not a binary either-or choice.

After all, a fully-patched system is also just as safe for Firefox or Opera as it is for IE6. Or don't they really believe that their systems are secure, and it's just hand-waving.

I ran into a $16 billion company Thursday that still is on IE6. Will I change anything so my product works with them? No - its chasing the tail of the market. At some point in the next year or two they're going to have to upgrade anyway.

The last boss who insisted on pixel-perfect IE6 compatibility stopped complaining all of a sudden when his favorite porn site (or was it his favorite poker site) forced the upgrade issue. If you believe that people's reasons for not upgrading are based on logic or economics, you're mistaken. Those are justifications or excuses, but the real reason is inertia (or they would have switched to Firefox or Opera long ago).

Re:Frosty Pizzo?

[Grant_Watson]

Interestingly, IE 9 seems to be following the rules for CSS and ES5, perhaps better than the other browsers. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Cleanup

[Tubal-Cain]

The second part is fair enough in this age of austerity (I'd rather have my taxes spent on schools and hospitals than software upgrade testing at the moment), but the whole reaction will be a disappointment to the petitioners."

That AutoRun virus that was going around a while back, how much did that cost to clean up?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Re:Cleanup

[timeOday]

Upgrading may or may not prevent problems. Many times it's a huge hassle with little or negative improvement. I don't upgrade software OR hardware any more just because I can; it's too much trouble, so I wait until I have a specific reason.

Re:Cleanup

[AfroTrance]

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

What's the ratio in SI units?

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

Ratio's always going to be 16:1... Ratios, by definition, have no units.

Re:Cleanup

[tokul]

That AutoRun virus that was going around a while back, how much did that cost to clean up?

That autorun virus vulnerability was introduced after upgrade to XP SP2. How many vulnerabilities will be introduced with upgrade to other major browser version? Who will handle support issues introduced by changes in Windows Explorer behavior. If IE is only a browser, why it changes the way Windows Explorer works.

Re:Cleanup

[maxwell demon]

The ratio is 0.0625. Therefore it's 62.5 grams per kilogram.

Re:Cleanup

[maxwell demon]

Ratios, by definition, have no units.

Wrong. Only ratios of quantities of the same type are unit-less. For example, the ratio of distance covered and time needed, also known as speed, very clearly has an unit.

Of course in this case we have units of the same type (namely mass), so the ratio is, indeed, just a number.

Re:Cleanup

[Billly Gates]

I worked for a shop a month ago that infected customer pcs with the autorun virus STILL.

We install WIndowsXP and unfortunately our flashdrives got infected with every pc we used including my laptop. The good news is that my Windows Vista on my laptop was not compatible with the virus. It is amazing how things just do not go away for IE 6,5 users with AVG anti virus.

Re:Cleanup

[zippthorne]

Uh.. It's the UK. The units are clearly *not* the same type: ounces are mass, but pounds are money!

Re:Cleanup

[phoenix321]

Software being too old, insecure and barely compatible is reason enough. A browser is a must-have piece of software nowadays and if you absolutely depend on a specific version of a specific product line, you're doing things wrong in the first place.

As IE6 is absolutely not available on any new version of Windows, it's effectively holding back all significant upgrades on the core operating system. Without updates to the operating system, the entire IT landscape is not only severely hobbled for innovation, but thoroughly insecure on major issues.

Don't allow yourself to fall prey to the illusion that software upgrades are an entirely voluntary - or useless - effort. In the best possible scenarios, holding back upgrades is saving a few percent of the cost and postponing the rest of upgrade expenditures. In friendly real-world scenarios, it's not saving any, merely postponing all upgrade costs. In any case, it's very very likely that during decade-long upgrade holdouts, IT department will lose it's edge and sharpness, get complacent and behind on the current state-of-the-art. And with that, the whole company will lose its pace.

Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 is easy. Upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major undertaking and upgrading from any older version is financial disaster.

Just because you CAN use old equipment until it literally falls apart, it doesn't mean it's the most sensible or cost-effective option to do so.

Re:Cleanup

[phoenix321]

XPSP2 was not a browser upgrade.

Either way, no one is forcing the IT department to stay at the bleeding edge. It may be profitable to do so, because usually, newer systems have some perks the older ones did not. But staying half a decade behind on current issues is not prudent, but paranoid.

That doesn't apply to real-time systems, systems of major criticality and systems with human lives at stake, but for regular office systems, holding back on upgrades forever is not prudent but complacent and possibly paranoid. Some day in the future, even Big Bank, SCADA and mission control systems WILL need to be upgraded. How will paranoid IT departments handle *that* if they never dared to upgrade even a single notebook in the least important offices? How will they gain any experience with the new stuff?

We all like to rave about prudence and ultra-mission-criticality of our IT, but unless we're working for NASA, NORAD, Big Bank or Big Energy SCADA, it's self-aggrandizing paranoia to think upgrading from IE6 to IE8 will bring the enterprise down, financially or otherwise.

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you stupid or just trying to be funny?

Re:Cleanup

[JustOK]

but I thought time was money and money was power. But the British pound has no power.

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

£1 an ounce? sounds like druggies paradise.

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I hear this, the only thing I can think is that there are offices still running on bootlegged Windows 2000. Prevention/Cure isn't the real debate here.

Re:Cleanup

[SimonTheSoundMan]

An ounce is a unit of weight, not mass.

Re:Cleanup

[SimonTheSoundMan]

What's that in deci-Bels?

Re:Cleanup

[Gonoff]

Software being too old, insecure and barely compatible

old
What is the inherent problem with software just being old? Do some of the bits fall off? Some of the bytes?

insecure
Many people here would remind you that it is insecure because of what it is - MS Windows. If you are going to replace it with MS Windows, it will still be insecure. Large organisations spend a lot of time keeping it secure. That is why people tell me they are not happy about our rules on what you can connect to our network, rules on USB, security policies and much much more.

barely compatible
That is a lot better that Vista which is not compatible at all and Windows 7 which needs to run a virual machine to be able to run most "corporate" applications.
In fact, this is the big killer. We have completely avoided Vista because major applications would not work. Now we are being told that we need to roll out an operating system that will not run on a reasonable fraction of our estate. Then, to make things work, we need to have XP on all of them as well?

Yes, I know that if we have to have the applications rewritten, getting them to work in a grown-up operating system would be a good idea and making all web apps browser agnostic is a must. That costs money now. Carrying on pushes it into the future.

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

No we have pounds in weight too. Being smarter than your average American we can handle homonyms :P

Re:Cleanup

[KiloByte]

Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 is easy. Upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major undertaking

Except, to upgrade from Vista you would first need to downgrade from XP to Vista, and that's a REALLY major disaster by itself.

Re:Cleanup

[KiloByte]

Ounces are not mass anymore, unless you go to one of the two last backward countries on Earth that still have them.

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

Software being too old, insecure and barely compatible is reason enough.

As long as it's supported by the software publisher or distributor in the form of security patches, the difference between security of new software and old software is rather marginal.

Don't allow yourself to fall prey to the illusion that software upgrades are an entirely voluntary - or useless - effort.

Don't allow yourself to fall prey to the illusion that you always need the latest and greatest.

Any enterprise level OS has (eventually) old software that's only patched for security.

Re:Cleanup

[John Hasler]

> An ounce is a unit of weight, not mass.

A US ounce is 1/16th of a US pound, which is an SI unit equal to 0.45359237 kg.

Re:Cleanup

[phoenix321]

The "Vista is bad" mantra is usually repeated by people that probably have never used it for a prolonged period of time.

Companies usually didn't roll out that one, so enterprisey experience base isn't that solid at all.

Having used and tinkered with Vista for a year at home with XP for being the standard at work for almost a decade now, I feel someway qualified to say that it didn't seem it wasn't even half the abomination it was declared to be.

Vista was not a stroke of genius, not incredibly fast, but it wasn't *that* awful. XPSP2 and SP3 bluescreened a few times per year on my Thinkpad, Vista didn't even bluescreen once. XP drivers worked reasonably well with Vista, on 32bit of course. Boot times of my stock Vista Business was about half than that of the heavily modded XP installation of my employer's notebook and decreased to about 40 seconds after migration to an SSD.

Windows 7 seems to be much faster than Vista and the same machine that had 40s boot time there now has 20s with Win7-64, with the GUI being more responsive and snappier.

But the real reason to not get too much behind on upgrading is user experience: switching from XP to Vista feels differently, but not a whole lot. Switching from Vista to Win7 is also noticeable with the GUI and interface, but with even less differences than before. But switching from XP to 7 is quite a jump. The UI and input metaphors feel completely alien if you never used Vista in between. Users will like the speed, but ask things like "Where's the search button?" or "What have they done to my Control Panel?".

Regular users can't switch easily from a 1960's Caprice to an all-electric Chevy Volt if they've never used a model in between them.

Re:Cleanup

[Low Ranked Craig]

As IE6 is absolutely not available on any new version of Windows

I'm running IE 6 on Windows 7. (Not because I want to) IE 6 is still available from Microsoft on MSDN and other channels. What I want to know is are we going to see the same thing with Corporate IT writing for IE9 and not web standards so in a few years we'll still be hacking sites to work on IE. I do a lot of testing in IE 8 and I've been playing with IE 9. Compared to current releases of, well, pretty much every browser IE still sucks, and sucks badly.

Re:Cleanup

[maxwell demon]

About -12 dB

Re:Cleanup

[tibit]

I don't see how upgrading from XP to Vista/Win 7 is a "major undertaking". The only problems I'd expect are related to specific customizations in a given deployment, and to old applications. It is a slightly bigger undertaking when you have a mixed environment with Samba-based domain server(s) and Windows clients, but even then a very part time admin like myself could figure it out in about a day (with some gnashing of teeth).

PS. Forget Win 7 with RHEL 5's Samba: you have to get newest samba instead.

Re:Cleanup

[mpe]

But the real reason to not get too much behind on upgrading is user experience: switching from XP to Vista feels differently, but not a whole lot. Switching from Vista to Win7 is also noticeable with the GUI and interface, but with even less differences than before. But switching from XP to 7 is quite a jump.

Would this "jump" be any smaller going from XP to Ubuntu? Which also means getting rid of complex to administer software licence systems, EULAs, CALs, etc, etc.

Re:Cleanup

[commodore64_love]

>>>I feel someway qualified to say that it didn't seem it wasn't even half the abomination it was declared to be.

Try running a brand new PC that you just bought, but only came with 1/2 gig of RAM because Microsoft said that's all Vista needs. It runs so slow you'll think there's a Pentium 1 (~200 megahertz) under the hood instead of a 3000 megahertz processor.

Although I later upgraded that PC to 1.5 gig, it still ran pretty poorly compared to my older XP machine.

Re:Cleanup

[mpe]

As long as it's supported by the software publisher or distributor in the form of security patches, the difference between security of new software and old software is rather marginal.

It may well be the case that the very new is actually a worst choice. The so called "bathtub curve" can be applicable to software. Even in cases where the supplier hasn't "sold" what is to all intents and purposes a badly tested "beta".

Re:Cleanup

[commodore64_love]

>>>Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 is easy. Upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major undertaking

Major undertaking? You lost me there. Windows 7 is just Vista with a +0.1 bugfix. NT 6.0 to 6.1. It's no more painful than moving from Windows 2000 to XP was (NT 5.0 to 5.1). Therefore if XP to Vista is easy, then XP to Seven should be almost as easy.
.

>>>Software being too old, insecure and barely compatible is reason enough.

But IE7 and 8 are no better, security wise. As for compatibility, if you move to IE8 or Firefox, and your timecard and other government apps break, how is that better? It's cheaper to stay put with IE6. ----- Maybe what the UK government really needs to do is have two browsers installed: IE8 for web surfing, and IE6 just for internal usage. Then they don't need to waste money updating their apps.

Oh and age: I'm still using MS Office 97. It still works just fine, and has a minimal memory footprint of just 4 megabytes. Plus it's fast. Why upgrade?

Re:Cleanup

[colinrichardday]

For example, the ratio of distance covered and time needed, also known as speed, very clearly has an unit.

But is that a ratio or a rate?

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha. You'd rather the money was spent on schools and hospitals? Have a guess which company's software products are used by UK schools and hospitals, ensuring the exclusion of open source. A fairly hefty proportion of the education and health budgets goes straight into Billy's back pocket, courtesy of the bent as fuck shower we have running the country.

Re:Cleanup

[Tubal-Cain]

What is the inherent problem with software just being old? Do some of the bits fall off? Some of the bytes?

No, but the rest of the world does not stand still for you. New software doesn't get designed for your 2-or-3-versions-out-of-date OS. People start using docx. The internet stops jumping through hoops to make websites that work in your browser.

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

too much trouble, you click the mouse like 3 times and wait 15 min, BAM IE9 is installed

lazy fuck

Re:Cleanup

[jimicus]

unless we're working for NASA, NORAD, Big Bank or Big Energy SCADA, it's self-aggrandizing paranoia to think upgrading from IE6 to IE8 will bring the enterprise down, financially or otherwise.

I bet you anything you like some enterprising soul in most government departments has already tried and established that several essential apps stop working in versions of IE later than 6.

This means that suddenly, upgrading the browser isn't a relatively simple "push it out through existing rollout tools and forget about it" job. It's a full-blown project to get all the other apps updated, which requires sign-off at a higher level and everyone will want their piece of the political pie.

Re:Cleanup

[DarkKnightRadick]

Oh and age: I'm still using MS Office 97. It still works just fine, and has a minimal memory footprint of just 4 megabytes. Plus it's fast. Why upgrade?

docx

Re:Cleanup

[DarkKnightRadick]

I got the joke.

Re:Cleanup

[Silvrmane]

What is the inherent problem with software just being old? Do some of the bits fall off?

The problem is that the web has actually moved on from what was standard practice 9 years ago. There are new methods to make crafting pleasant looking web pages easier and more productive. IE6 is simply too out of date for a large chunk of what is possible to do on the web anymore, forcing web developers to waste time doing their sites two ways. In my case, I build my sites to work in all current versions of browsers, and then spend an additional 30% to 40% of my development time making it work in IE6 as well. I'm starting to think of listing support for IE6 as a separate billing item so that the client can more accurately evaluate how important it really is to keep supporting this cranky old beast of a browswer.

Re:Cleanup

[mjwalshe]

what sort of level of IT knowledge do you imagine an MP or Senior Civil Servant have? They probaly still think its a TV Typewriter that "Mrs Briggs does the typing" on.

Re:Cleanup

[Pentium100]

Ubuntu supports even less Windows XP software than Windows 7.

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice.org

Re:Cleanup

[DarkKnightRadick]

I know that, but commodore64_love uses Office 97 and wants to know why s/he should upgrade. Obviously if s/he thinks Office 97 is sufficient, they won't know and/or care about OOo.

Re:Cleanup

[phoenix321]

User friendliness or GUI doesn't suffice. Unless it runs not any office suite, but "Microsoft Office", it's a dead duck for many businesses.

Switching the OS would be almost trivial compared to re-training all those MS Office aficionados to Open Office or similar. I'm sure there's a way to run it eg. with WINE, but with enterprisey IT departments being as defensive, paranoid, old-school as we know them, it won't be given a chance. A one-time cost of 100 bucks per notebook for that Windows license will be shrugged off as peanuts, as long as the tried-and-tested potpourri of that enterprisey software runs without anyone thinking twice.

Re:Cleanup

[Anonymous Coward]

If the user needs docx at one point, like you suggested, perhaps OOo could help with that in a sufficient way and remove or postpone the need for Office update. I forgot to include the ;) in the previous post.

Re:Cleanup

[commodore64_love]

If I encounter docx (which I haven't so far), I'd first consider whether or not I need to see that file (probably not), and if the answer is yes then go off and acquire the Viewing program I need.

Re:Cleanup

[DarkKnightRadick]

In that regard, yeah. But if they are still using Office 97, I don't think they care about OOo. ):

Re:Cleanup

[DarkKnightRadick]

Which would either be OOo (I don't know if AbiWord can handle it) or an Office upgrade.

Re:Cleanup

[jowifi]

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Shouldn't that be a pence of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

Re:Cleanup

[Tubal-Cain]

No, it's definitely "oz" and "lb", which implies to me it is referring to the weight of (obsolete) medications, rather than the cost.

Re:Cleanup

[phoenix321]

If you truly don't need to see that docx file that was just sent to you then you either have illiterate or malleable clients, clients deep in the bowels of enterprisey IT or no clients.

If you have no clients, either you are the one handing out the money to contractors - or you pay in welfare checks anyway.

Reading Comprehension?

[Manip]

Their response was to the suggestion of changing browsers. Their post sets out very clearly that they're migrating their applications and workstations to IE8.

Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. There is no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure

And:

Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation,

Does make one wonder if the submitter or the editor even read it.

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they are stupid, upgrading for IE8, and then? IE9 arrives, they can start all over, the should change there browser, use firefox or chrome or anyting else, at least then, when Ie9 of Ie10 comes out, it will start to work better instead of working different...

Until microsoft has join the other browser developers in compatibility, every next version will be a different beast to program against. Yes I know IE9 is better, but as long as it isn't finished, and a lot of people haven't used it, it's still not there, you can't use it... And I'm not going to install it...

At the moment I need XP + IE7, Windows 7+IE8, and no IE8 compatibility mode is not equals to IE7.

So IE9 has no place yet here... At least firefox you can install on the same machine more than once, by using different profiles...

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[maxwell demon]

Their post sets out very clearly that they're migrating their applications and workstations to IE8.

I wonder if you have read it. Here's the complete paragraph from which you quoted one (partial) sentence (emphasis by me; the first emphasized sentence is the one you quoted):

It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users. To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users.

So it's quite clear that they are not upgrading IE versions.

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[rich_r]

Apart, of course, from the departments that are. Like the Home Office, and other departments running a Fujitsu contract.

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[Yvanhoe]

Good.
Still I don't understand how works the mind of people who believe that government should depend on software they don't have the source of, they didn't compile themselves, they didn't audited, and that comes from a company that has many interest on spying on them.

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[bev_tech_rob]

Oh, please. You think most governments are going to pay the money required to have someone on staff with enough expertise to review and compile open source code? They are going to do whatever it takes as cheaply as it takes to get the software it needs from the lowest priced vendor or whomever gives them the best deal... Wait, spend $$$$$$$ to hire a competent programmer or systems engineer to evaluate, compile and SUPPORT this code or spend $$ to buy copies of Winxp or Vista from CDW and buy ready to go software from large vendor who can sell below cost to take out open source vendor? You tell me...

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously have never worked in government IT.

Departments in the UK government spend £millions in testing software. Sad thing is, one department will do the testing, then another has to do exactly the same wasting money in the process.

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[KiloByte]

They do NOT go to the lowest priced vendor, since the lowest priced vendor charges 0, and they took instead one that takes nearly as much as the hardware costs.

Hiring fewer more skilled admins rather than a horde of MCSEs would be financially beneficial as well.

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[the_womble]

In that case they need to admit that a foreign company has the ability to plant spy ware in their systems. Your military, foreign relations, trade systems are no longer secret.

They also need to evaluate and compile each piece of software (operating system component, library, app) only once.

Spreading this cost out over all public sector employees with a PC would make it extremely low. They should also require its use by private sector employees handling confidential government data. It could also be available to anyone else who wanted it.

The cost would be trivial to any government of a major economy.

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[mpe]

Departments in the UK government spend £millions in testing software. Sad thing is, one department will do the testing, then another has to do exactly the same wasting money in the process.

Or they'll pay some contractor to do the testing. Then there will be a complex chain of sub contracting which will at each stage take their cut.

Re:Reading Comprehension?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they used standards, there wouldn't be all this testing.

Oh, here's the problem

[phantomfive]

The petition creators goofed, they started it out with this sentence:

The German and French governments have started to encourage people to upgrade away from the browser Internet Explorer 6

Heh, can't start copying the French and Germans now, can we? Next thing you know we'll be on the Euro! That killed it right there. Made it politically unfeasible. All those petition signers are stupid francophiles.

Re:Oh, here's the problem

[rossdee]

You know Firefox has an en-gb version, I'll bet the French and Germans aren't using that one...

Re:Oh, here's the problem

[mpe]

You know Firefox has an en-gb version,

Does MSIE yet have an en-gb version? How about MS Windows or Office? When it comes to language localisation Open Source Software is typically much better than proprietary software. Though interestingly free proprietary can be better than paid for proprietary.

Re:Oh, here's the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Buddy, you're so full of shit your eyes are brown.

UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need IE8?

[Ocker3]

Some online vendor sites have started requiring that you use IE8 to access the site, apparently because Mastercard is forcing them too. My company's standard is IE7, good thing I'm in IT so I have the rights to install 8 on one workstation for when I have to buy software from that company-selected portal that requires IE8 now...

Ignorance is Bliss

[Anonymous Coward]

(I'd rather have my taxes spent on schools and hospitals than software upgrade testing at the moment)

Will you be thinking that when your medical records, your children's school records and any tax or government data held on you is stolen away because some idiot government employee doesn't follow the IT Policy to the letter and visits a malware loaded site/link using an outdated browser? How about you just update the god damn infrastructure and next time don't develop systems which require bullshit (Like ActiveX or IE specific HTML) to run. Oh right, for some reason it's seems to be an impossible task to develop suitable Government IT systems for any government even though companies seem to do it everyday.

Re:Ignorance is Bliss

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

Oh right, for some reason it's seems to be an impossible task to develop suitable Government IT systems for any government even though companies seem to do it everyday.

Don't underestimate the stupidity of (large) companies.

Re:Ignorance is Bliss

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yeah, we all know of bad company IT projects but when was the last time you heard of a successful IT project from any government? Whether it be travel cards, police databases or websites, no government seems to be able to make a competent solution even when they contract out to third parties. Why is it government have such higher failure rates when it comes to IT projects?

Re:Ignorance is Bliss

[phoenix321]

Big X has a high failure rate when it comes to IT projects, with X being any lumbering beast of an enterprise, office or agency.

They want standardization, homogeneity and identical software tools and IT workplaces for not one office, one city, one branch but the entire multinational group of companies.

Any project involving more than 300 clients is hard or ridiculously expensive. Projects trying to make a one-size-fits-all tool for 100.000 employees of a multinational corporation or agency is financial suicide.

But watch CIOs keep talking about synergy effects and purported savings in the billions for the group when in reality, all they manage to achieve is IT tools set in stone for decades, with change procedures filling entire floors if printed out and grinding the whole thing into a permanent halt from which there is no way but burning millions to get out. Relying on Monolithic IT means betting the farm for large companies and agencies and some will fail spectacularly by doing that.

Re:Ignorance is Bliss

[squiggleslash]

Why would you hear about a successful IT project from the government?

Government IT projects are exactly the same as any corporation's, they're internal projects you'd never use unless you actually worked for the government. On occasion they'll put out a public website for entering data, but even then it'd be the website, not the underlying infrastructure, you'd actually be exposed to.

If it's successful, it works, there's nothing to proclaim, and so you don't hear about it. If it fails, people complain.

Governments across the world have many, many, successful IT projects, just like companies like Proctor and Gamble, Coca Cola, and Time Warner. You don't hear about them, because you don't use them.

Re:Ignorance is Bliss

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't put the blame for this on "Large" corporations. What does that mean anyway? More than 10,000 employees? 10 people could have a market cap of 1 trillion dollars, are they "large"?

The blame for all this is squarely on the shoulders of a mind-gap in society, and this mind-gap mimics the generation gap. Many managers have no understanding of the ramifications of their decisions, whether it's myopia or technical shortfalls. The result of this is that only the dumber people from the younger generations are getting promoted. The smartest of these tell the older managers what they want to hear, and let the experts do their jobs. The dumb ones only do the former, and end up moving around a lot to avoid getting pinned with failures of their own design.

At the bottom, it's exhausting to fight the same fights over and over again, and some simply give up and do as they're told, and wait for the rapture.

Re:UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need I

[Anonymous Coward]

You should use a real standard browser instead.

pus ies

[globalsnake]

What a bunch of pusies send me an email stating not to worry about tomorrow instead of a quote. A broken network as supposed truth as a lie is still a lie. Go away pussies. If not pussies come and get me bitches am waiting.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[EricX2]

Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million activex exploits a day. If they stop using IE6. They start losing 1 million activex exploits a day. Thats the reality of the situation. If the government stops using IE6, it costs them 1 Million British fake antivirus's a day (Or whatever the current malware conversion is.)

Info :)

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a council environment and to implement ie7 or 8 would take to the point we would have to go round every machine plus we have in house built software which has only just started working for ie6 (weeyyyy council coders) so yeah would cost to much to go around 3000 machines each just to install it when it works fine as it is (Minus all the exploitive stuff) but all anti crap picks that stuff up anyways so.. xP. -- Would log in and make sence but 2 days of boooze doesnt help the matter.

Re:Info :)

[Ice Tiger]

And what about your increasing opportunity cost with using an increasingly vendor unsupported browser?

You do know that supporting IE 6 in modern web applications is very expensive as can take up 50% + of developers time on workarounds? So having to support your internal population as well as your external user base increases the costs of any external facing web sites you do.

Re:Info :)

[jabuzz]

What are you going to do in less than four years time when XP support is completely removed by Microsoft then? I would suggest that having all internal web applications not be tied to a specific version of Windows and/or IE would be a good starting point in planning your migration from XP.

If you bury your head in the sand then in three years time there will be a major panic and you will have to do something.

Re:Info :)

[jonbryce]

A lot of government computers still run NT4, so I think they have an answer to that question.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[The Master Control P]

Assume I can fly...

Oh wait.

it shouldn't cost anything

[thetoadwarrior]

Upgrading to IE7 or any IE is free. Just run Windows update.

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[kvezach]

Unless you use old ActiveX programs that don't support newer versions of IE, that is.

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[Skrynesaver]

When you are a large institution who have (over)paid consultants to create workflow tools on your intranet, upgrading is far from free. The new approved browser will have to be validated against your existing tools, then you'll have to do rewrites where you had horrible IE6 kludges. The cost of the software isn't the issue, it's the cost of delivering your applications on that platform that is the issue.

With that said it provides a wonderful example of why organisations should avoid proprietary extensions to standards. One day the world will move on and you'll be stuck with an un-integrateable piece of shit platform.

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[JohnVanVliet]

"Unless you use old ActiveX programs that don't support newer versions of IE, that is."
And if you are , then you DESERVE to get infected.

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[RulerOf]

The cost of the software isn't the issue, it's the cost of delivering your applications on that platform that is the issue.

That thing kinda gets me thinking... Wouldn't it be possible to run ActiveX inside of an IE Frame on top of another browser? Probably not a later version of IE, which is a shame, but it'd be neat if you could migrate the default browser up and then whitelist in all the broken shit to a frame running on the older rendering engine via group policy or something. That'd be nice I think, but from what I've experienced, IE is easier to deploy and manage (at the moment, at least) than any other browser when considering group policy, and MS won't support side by side installs... funny considering that whole WinSXS platform they've got going ;)

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[thetoadwarrior]

No point in putting off changing those applications because you can't run IE6 forever.

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[Rich0]

That's like saying that there is no point in putting off retirement, because you can't work forever.

If they delay spending millions of dollars for one year, then that is a net savings for the company. A million dollars next year is cheaper than a million dollars this year.

Plus, maybe during that year a few more IE6-only apps get retired, and as a result the upgrade just gets that much easier.

We run into this kind of problem all the time at work. Imagine that you buy a $500k machine 5 years ago. It is run by a controller. The controller software runs on Windows XP - great corporate standard and all that. Today IT starts talking about moving to Windows 7. You check, and that controller doesn't run on Windows 7. The manufacturer who made the machine doesn't support windows 7 for that machine either, only for the newer model of the machine. So, now you're either stuck on Windows XP, or you are buying another $500k machine. Now imagine the machine cost $5M and requires that the building housing it be constructed around it, and consider your options.

No, the vendor doesn't care, because they know they make the best machine around, and for anything costing that much you're luck if there are 2 or 3 vendors in the whole world.

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[Bing Tsher E]

For that kind of application you specify the controller as a proprietary stand alone piece of equipment. You don't allow the data janitors (IT) any access to it, just like the broom janitors don't get to futz with the x-ray machine. If it needs limited access to the network, specia provision is made. Operators who fuck with it in any way (tards are always tempted to 'tweak') are reprimanded, demoted, or fired.

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[Rich0]

Yup - and that is more-or-less what we do. However, the result is that some box running XP, or NT, or whatever still exists, much to the chagrin of the occasional purist. What else can you do?

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[jd2112]

One day the world will move on and you'll be stuck with an un-integrateable piece of shit platform.

I thought that was what was happening here.

Re:it shouldn't cost anything

[TheLink]

You can't live forever either. But most people keep trying to put off the inevitable.

Procrastination is great, I'll tell you why later...

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Gordonjcp]

Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. If they stop using IE6. They start losing 1 million dollars a day. Thats the reality of the situation.

Except it's nothing like reality. They *only* lose 1 million dollars a day if they stop using IE6 *and then don't use anything else*.

Here's a car analogy. Using a Mercedes Vito van makes me a certain quantity of thousands of pounds per year (I'm British, we don't disclose ages or wages). So, if I stop using a Merc, I stop earning money, right? Wrong. If I stop using a Mercedes Vito, I start using a Citroën Berlingo, or a Ford Transit, or some similar van.

It's really a pretty simple idea.

Dictionary

[gmuslera]

Someone should inform them about the meaning of targetted attack. Malware detectors find widely known malware, but could have little clue about things made specially against you.

Re:Dictionary

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

Their security advisor is probably a Zimbabwean member of Al Qaeda with a deep sympathy for the Taliban due to his Afghan roots - but only since he lost his communist party membership in the USSR when it was abolished.

Besides that, he probably has only the interests of the UK in mind.

Reality: deal with it

[DNS-and-BIND]

This is something called reality that has to be dealt with. I know this is typically not what petition signers encounter in their daily lives, but endure this explanation. The truth is that critical applications depend on IE6 to function, and upgrading from IE6 would cause work to stop. They shouldn't have built their apps on IE6? Blame Microsoft, their ruthless tactics led to that situation.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[dangitman]

The truth is that critical applications depend on IE6 to function, and upgrading from IE6 would cause work to stop.

I wasn't aware that you could only have one browser installed on a computer at a time. What's wrong with installing Firefox for 99% of tasks, and also having IE6 available for the obsolete and soon to be extinct tasks that require it?

Re:Reality: deal with it

[Ice Tiger]

That's why as part of your upgrade you upgrade / fix those apps to work on a modern browser, the alternative is you come to day when you can't upgrade anything in your IT ecology due to everything being so brittle.

Another way of looking at things is that as IE6 gets dropped from supported browser lists over the next few years you can be faced with the situation of critical app a stuck with IE 6 but critical app b needing to be upgraded but because it has dropped support for IE 6 you can't without incurring massive project costs.

Not keeping your software at least to supported versions is a false economy, much like the money you save not putting oil in your car, that is of course until the engine seizes.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[slinches]

What's wrong with installing Firefox for 99% of tasks, and also having IE6 available for the obsolete and soon to be extinct tasks that require it?

1. In the corporate world "soon to be extinct tasks" run on HPUX boxes. IE6 based web apps are just reaching what they would consider as stable.

and

2. Most people don't even know what a browser is, let alone have the ability to choose which is best to use from a security standpoint.

Although, I did just recently join an IE8 beta program at work. So it seems that change isn't impossible, just really slow.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[linebackn]

I wasn't aware that you could only have one browser installed on a computer at a time. What's wrong with installing Firefox for 99% of tasks, and also having IE6 available for the obsolete and soon to be extinct tasks that require it?

What's wrong is that it costs time and money for the variety of things that go in to supporting and maintaining an additional application. The bean counters would throw a fit at the idea of spending money on two applications that do effectively the same thing.

And thanks to Microsoft's brilliant "integration", it is not possible to remove the costs of supporting IE, even after any intranet sites that required it are extinct. IE is always installed with Windows. You can remove the icon, but it must still be configured, patched, and otherwise maintained for all of the idiotic Microsoft applications that potentially may embed its rendering engine.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[Anonymous Coward]

Disable the ability of users to surf anything but specific "applications" (sites) dependent on it... and force them to use firefox for "Web" access. It's really not that complicated. This should be as trivial as setting up links on the desktop/favorites/or a home page with links to the "applications" dependent on IE6. No corporation should be using IE6. Even those applications that companies are relying on need to be "ported". IE6 is no longer available on new versions of MS Windows. It also isn't available on OTHER operating systems that SHOULD BE getting the attention of companies for better security practices and a lower TCO. Yes- it costs money to port these applications- but it has to be done one way or the other and the failure to do it to operating system neutral and open standards compliant technologies should be criminal if it isn't.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[dangitman]

IE6 based web apps are just reaching what they would consider as stable.

Bullshit. Nobody has ever considered those "applications" stable. In any but the most backwards companies, these IE6 web apps are not long for this world. The only companies interested in keeping them around are the companies which are soon to be extinct.

2. Most people don't even know what a browser is, let alone have the ability to choose which is best to use from a security standpoint.

Again, bullshit. Most people do know what a browser is. There are a few people around (like the elderly) who don't understand the concept. But those who don't won't be in a job for much longer.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[dangitman]

What's wrong is that it costs time and money for the variety of things that go in to supporting and maintaining an additional application.

It costs very little time and money to support Firefox. It probably costs a lot more to continue supporting the outdated IE6.

The bean counters would throw a fit at the idea of spending money on two applications that do effectively the same thing.

Well, the bean counters would be wrong. The costs of security vulnerability and help desk support for IE6 most likely outweigh the costs of Firefox deployment by a wide margin.

IE is always installed with Windows.

I didn't think it was even possible to install IE6 with Vista or Windows 7, at least without some serious work-arounds.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[tehdaemon]

"Most people do know what a browser is."

Yeah - it is that funny word the 'IT' guy mumbles when he tells me in that frustrated voice to click on the blue 'E'. I have no idea why he thinks I should have been able to figure this out myself, that blue 'E' thing was clear over on the other side of the screen. How was I supposed to know what to do! And I wish he would point at the desk instead of the screen when he is talking about the desktop. That is just so confusing!!!

Note: in RL I am that 'IT' guy. This minor exaggeration does not apply to most people, but it does describe a lot of them. They are not all elderly. If you call the company website, and IE, 'the internet' do you really know what a browser is?

T

Re:Reality: deal with it

[rawler]

Blame Microsoft, their ruthless tactics led to that situation.

Fool me once: shame on you.
Fool me twice...

Re:Reality: deal with it

[thegarbz]

Yep but try selling the idea of replacing something that works "just fine" to the people who hold all the money. I couldn't get capital funding to replace the aircon that keeps all our critical systems cool, and now it's on the way out. The maintenance budget just got blown by $100000 but hey there was no other way. They denied my request for capital expenditure for this. Shame too, $100000 depreciable over 10 years would have provided a nicer tax break then a $100000 unknown revenue spend and an argument over budgets.

These are the kinds of people I fight on a daily basis. The kind who won't spend money on critical systems. From one person requiring funding to another, I hereby wish you Good Luck!

Re:Reality: deal with it

[Bogtha]

They shouldn't have built their apps on IE6? Blame Microsoft, their ruthless tactics led to that situation.

No, blame incompetent IT departments. Back when those kinds of apps were being built, the prevailing attitude in these kinds of places was that cross-browser compatibility was unnecessary for intranet applications. People like myself always loudly pointed out that relying on proprietary Internet Explorer 6-only code would lock them into a single vendor and cause problems if Microsoft ever moved further towards standard code. There were only ever two types of response - either "never gonna happen" or "we'll deal with that when it happens". And now they are dealing with it, incurring costs that were entirely avoidable.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[John Hasler]

> Most people do know what a browser is.

Many don't even know what software is (though they will glibly assert that they know all about "technology" because they are adept with their 'pods).

> There are a few people around (like the elderly) who don't understand the concept.

Some of the elderly admit that they know little about computers. This puts them ahead of those who know a whole lot that isn't true.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[John Hasler]

> Blame Microsoft, their ruthless tactics led to that situation.

Yes. After all, how could one expect the tiny, helpless little British government to resist the power of the mighty Microsoft?

Re:Reality: deal with it

[mpe]

I wasn't aware that you could only have one browser installed on a computer at a time. What's wrong with installing Firefox for 99% of tasks, and also having IE6 available for the obsolete and soon to be extinct tasks that require it?

In such a situation "upgrading" IE is unlikely to be the best option. Since it is difficult to install multiple versions of it, at least under Windows.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[mpe]

No, blame incompetent IT departments. Back when those kinds of apps were being built, the prevailing attitude in these kinds of places was that cross-browser compatibility was unnecessary for intranet applications.

Not all of these are developed in house. So the blame may lay with a contractor or supplier.

People like myself always loudly pointed out that relying on proprietary Internet Explorer 6-only code would lock them into a single vendor and cause problems if Microsoft ever moved further towards standard code.

Together with ironies like it might have been less work to write something which was mostly/entirely standard HTML in the first place and that these applications may be served from Apache (running under a non Windows OS).

Re:Reality: deal with it

[colinrichardday]

Send a British warship to Vancouver (Hey, we're one big happy Commonwealth!) and launch a cruise missile at Redmond?

Re:Reality: deal with it

[winwar]

"Not all of these are developed in house. So the blame may lay with a contractor or supplier."

The blame still lies with the company that bought the product. They chose, right or wrong, to save money upfront.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[DigiShaman]

Most of the time, it's a game of Hot Potato. Management keeps passing the pota....er..problem to the next person in line. As long as that potato doesn't get dropped on their watch, it's all good.

BTW, don't drop the potato or else you get blamed.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[dextermanas]

I wasn't aware that you could only have one browser installed on a computer at a time. What's wrong with installing Firefox for 99% of tasks, and also having IE6 available for the obsolete and soon to be extinct tasks that require it?

What's wrong is that it costs time and money for the variety of things that go in to supporting and maintaining an additional application. The bean counters would throw a fit at the idea of spending money on two applications that do effectively the same thing.

Could you explain how it would cost a significant amount of time/money just to deploy Firefox across the machines? If you have proper app-deployment infrastructure in place, it shouldn't take more than a few clicks. Then send out a note saying "you can use Firefox for all the non-intranet stuff, just remember that we don't officially support it". And you're all set. Firefox auto-updates itself so that's taken care of as well. Eventually one could start using IE Tab+Firefox and remove IE (the icon). IE Tab can automatically open pre-defined websites in an IE instance within Firefox itself, thus the end user only has to deal with one browser (icon). When they visit the IE6-only site, it opens up in IE tab, but all other sites would work in Firefox. Problem solved.

Re:Reality: deal with it

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand sticking to IE6 for specific internal applications, but what do you do when the rest of the commercial world cuts off support for IE6? If you have to ship and track product as an example and UPS or fedex cut off support for IE6 what then?

A fully patched IE6?

[nacturation]

IE8 is the patch to IE6.

Re:A fully patched IE6?

[DigiShaman]

No, it's a replacement.

The IE8 compatibility mode doesn't work worth shit.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Anonymous Coward]

An upgrade away from IE6 will be too expensive. It'll cost a lot of money to go to a website, perform a download and wait a few minutes for a browser to install.

Myopia

[VincenzoRomano]

The consideration about costs is right, if you defer security decisions so much that you're still running IE6 in 2010.
The consideration about firewalls and scanners is also right, if your policy is to go on patching a broken roof instead or making proper repairs.
God save the Great Britain (as well as the Little one)!

Re:Myopia

[Anonymous Coward]

The consideration about costs is right, if you defer security decisions so much that you're still running IE6 in 2010.

Deferring cost doesn't reduce it, likely makes it greater, as well as increasing exposure to risk. If managers were half as smart as they should be they should be clamping down on this. IT managers are under too much pressure to constrain cost, this means organisations will hang on to aging IT infrastructure until it outright fails.

Dare I say deferring it 12 months might mean staff turnover makes it Someone Else's Problem when it does all go FUBAR*

* Before you respond, yes I am aware that most organizations find it cheaper to let things go wrong then throw lawyers at the problem, than to prevent it in the first place.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[dangitman]

I have a bit of a mantra when I talk about IE6. Whenever anyone asks me why anyone would run IE6, I give this response:
Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. If they stop using IE6. They start losing 1 million dollars a day. Thats the reality of the situation.

That's about the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard. If this is your mantra, then you should not be employed anywhere, for any job.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Ice Tiger]

Assume they are now using IE 7 which hasn't been dropped or going to be dropped in the supported list of browsers by many vendors in 2010 and they can earn 1.5 million pounds a day! A silly figure but then your argument only makes sense if people switch from IE6 to nothing.

IE 6 has an increasing opportunity cost associated with its continued use over time not to mention that it dramatically increases any software development cost of any project that has to support it AND modern browsers i.e. external facing government web sites.

The company I work for is upgrading from IE 6 to IE 7 because it is becoming too expensive to stay on IE 6 for the reasons above and others.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Warll]

...ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense

Long live...

[Anonymous Coward]

IE6! Let it never die!

Seriously, having used IE8, IE6 is much nicer in terms of the user interface.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[mlts]

Actually, the tech details are just pushing a .MSI file out with IE8, or just approving it from a WSUS server.

My rant: IE6 is 10 year old technology. A Web browser is on the front lines of keeping a machine secure, almost as much so as a router. IE6 is meant to deal with spyware from the year 2001. Not the botnets and SCADA-seeking malware of 2010. Anyone who has any sense can see this.

There is just no reason to run IE6 on XP unless it is testing backlevel versions. IE8 fixes a lot of security issues. Even Windows XP needs to be binned because it is going to be a decade old, and organizations need to move forward to operating systems more able to handle the security issues of this decade.

This doesn't even need a car example, but a war example: You don't send out Greek phalanxes in formation against people with 10,000 rpm chainguns, Apache helicopters, and flamethrowers. Fielding Windows XP is doing just this.

The blackhats, phishers, scammers, spammers, criminals, and other miscreants are not going to be easing up attacks anytime soon. So why deal with threats of 2010 with an OS made nine years ago?

Of course, firewalls mitigate this, but there is something sort of wrong with compensating for a poor OS's security by having to fortify the router and perimeter instead of having the OS be reliable enough so a blackhat isn't home free once they get into the core network fabric.

Sad

[sugarmotor]

Sad that something which appears so trivial turns out to be expensive.

Stephan

Re:Sad

[thegarbz]

If this appears so very trivial then you have not properly examined the scope of the work. Start by testing each and every application that each and every one of your users use on a daily basis on a machine which no longer has IE6. Soon your simple free upgrade project will grow some very expensive arms and legs.

Re:Sad

[sugarmotor]

Yes, why does it need so much testing? Why is there any issue at all? Why is it so dddddangerous?

That is soooo sad.

Stephan

Re:Sad

[TheLink]

Because you could lose your job if it goes wrong? That's often considered undesirable.

The rewards for risk taking in some organizations are very low, or even negative.

So if things are working overall (even though there are some problems- there aren't any show stoppers), you don't push for any changes.

And if change is required, many have concluded that it's often a good idea to spend other people's money in order to keep your job. Can't be too careful right? :)

Re:Sad

[sugarmotor]

I think your analysis starts a bit too far down the story.

Doesn't the problem start with MS and their Internet Explorer strategy, or people who trust them to deliver something usable?

Stephan

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's more like: someone else signed off on that project 10 years ago when the web was the in thing and IE was a reasonable choice because Netscape was actually crappier then. And after some hiccups, it worked... Mostly :).

Re:Sad

[thegarbz]

Why is it so dddddangerous?

You say that with sarcasm, but in reality it's not dangerous to me or any of the other end users. But it is dangerous to your career when you gloriously fuck up the ability for all the employees to use systems they depend on daily.

If you're asking "why does this need testing", when talking about a fundamental change to an underlying application, then you should not be working in IT.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

The rewards for risk taking in some organizations are very low, or even negative.

Ha! They're behaving just like the Soviet Russia. Might their future be the same as well, who knows.

Re:UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need I

[91degrees]

IE8 is a standard. Microsoft making it pretty much makes it so.

Yes sad indeed

[pawnipt]

Can IE6 even render half of the internet anymore?! I don't believe facebook even works for it, not that facebook is educational lol. You know damn well all the kids at school are going to be like "Man this really sucks!"

Re:Yes sad indeed

[Mashiki]

Well what an excellent idea. I hereby support IE6 be standard in order to kill facebook.

Re:Yes sad indeed

[vlueboy]

There are no apparent rendering problems with Facebook on home PC's under IE6, though have gotten an "operation aborted" OK dialog box when signing in, and nothing bad occurred after that. The world's other XP PC's have it by default, being the path of "least resistance" and maybe even running pirate versions with Automatic Updates turned off make up the majority of the IE6 internet.

If there's one thing any online publisher is, it will be "cautious." They test starting on IE6, and then IE7 and so forth. Alternative browsers go next. That's why even Youtube only suggests upgrading, but does not just refuse to work like certain smaller-scale and security-conscious banking sites.

Stupid argument

[Anonymous Coward]

"The second part is fair enough in this age of austerity"? I really don't get the editor's rationale. Once somebody breaks into the government's computer system, they can hurt state finances a lot more than an economic crisis. We'll see how much money will be left for schools and hospitals after somebody hacks your ministries.

Also, I'd really worry about my government if they're unable even to upgrade the system's default browser via Windows update. What does that mean for their ability to upgrade the whole system? Hell, what does that mean for their ability to build schools and hospitals?

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Anonymous Coward]

And with my steel toed size 10 and 1/2's, you can get an earlier start on your flight, fancy that?

Too expensive? Pah.

[Retron]

What a load of rubbish that "too expensive" excuse is. I work as a technician in a school with around 700 PCs (several hundred each of laptops and a mix of old/new desktops) and we ditched IE6 ages ago. The cost was near zero for the curriculum PCs, as RM issued an IE7 patch ages ago. Allocating it was as simple as selecting lists of PCs and clicking "allocate". We upgraded teacher laptops on a rolling programme, the same with desktop PCs. We're now redeploying Windows across the whole site - teacher machines now have Windows 7 so it's not an issue, while the curriculum builds of Windows XP have IE8 in the base image.
The only "expensive" bit was a day of my time fixing issues with some rubbishy Java applet that is used in the library, which isn't very happy with IE8. A day of my time is worth £40, so it wasn't exactly expensive to fix!
If a school can do it, I'm sure government departments can too.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If a school can do it, I'm sure government departments can too."

Because they are comparable in scale, security issues and criticality, right?

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[rapiddescent]

most of the large ukgov departments have outsourced their IT support to companies like HP, Fujitsu, Logica, Capita and so on. Due to the ukgov ineptitude of writing good outsource contracts - an IE upgrade is off plan and so the outsourcer (in a monopoly position at that department) simply charge the earth - even if it is just to roll out an update automatically. Excuses such as testing, and verification of intranet applications simply make the cost even higher

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[nabeshiniii]

As a UK government worker, my current browser of choice is Firefox 4.0 Beta 2. Those of us in the office who are at least a bit tech savvy have Chrome or Firefox running on our desktops. Unlike schools, mainstream government departments have bespoke software that relies on IE to function (which I don't use, but I know about 80% of the office use). New laptops are now W7 with IE8, but until the IT department wants to upgrade all the bespoke systems so that they can function with IE8, it IS too expensive.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[Retron]

Because they are comparable in scale, security issues and criticality, right?

Definitely. Imagine 1700 users eager to break out of the firewall, eager to get to places they shouldn't do and to install programs that they're not allowed. At least government departments don't generally have people working in them who'd do anything to install crapware from the Net! That's not including the 100 or so teachers and 100 support staff, some of whom would (and indeed did, until we blocked it) install anything they find with a "click here" button.
And I'm sure there are government departments with fewer PCs and users than ours.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[thegarbz]

Still got your head stuck in a security point of view. You work in a school of a few students and 200 staff. There's a finite complexity to your IT infrastructure. Have you even seen a government network before? It's a mixmash of standards and software. Nothing is standardised between departments, one website may work just fine in IE8 the next may totally crap itself. I work for a multinational company. I don't know what the rest of it looks like but there would be some 5000 users in Australia. I run firefox and maintain a list of current 11 shortcuts which specifically start IE6 for certain applications and intranet sites. That is 11 enterprise class applications with all the fun licensing agreements, and I know at least one is used world wide. The global intranet portal also requires IE6.

I'm happy for you that you got away from that nastyness, but a small isolated school simply does not compare in size or scope of an upgrade for something as large, complicated, and dependant on antiquated crap as a large government. I guarantee you if they rolled out IE8 at the fortune 50 company I work at without some forethought we'll be down the bottom of the fortune 500 list very quickly.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[rawler]

At least government departments don't generally have people working in them who'd do anything to install crapware from the Net!

I don't work in government, but from what I've seen users are users regardless of occupation. Non-tech users rarely read popups, and install whatever blinks and looks shiny. Technical users are always sure THEY have a reason to circumvent your firewall and application policies, if only because they can.

From what I've seen in the enterprise sector though (I work for one of the global fortune-500 corporations, and I daily see their it-struggles) , I suspect there may be a LOT of 3d-party "web-apps" that isn't really "web"-apps, but IE6-apps, dependent on specific VBscript and ActiveX-quirks to work properly. Multiply your library-applet case a couple of times, and add an exponent to reflect the cases when the problem is at a level where you need to consult vendors to get it, and an exponent for all the inter-dependencies of all the "hotfixes", and you've probably got a reasonable cost-estimate.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[rawler]

Oh, I forgot to mention. I don't want to defend the "too expensive" argument. It definately IS expensive, but that's just due to lacking diligence previously, accepting sub-standard quality applications into your organization.

Many IT-admins either don't care, don't know, or fails to explain to stake-holders why crappy odd-ball software, even though it "works" is a really bad idea in the long run.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[Anonymous Coward]

about 50% of school have outsourced IT too. Software validation usually is mandated by the service provider because contractually failures are very expensive for them. Software Validation is very expensive for the schools. Depressingly some vendors insist that each institution pay for validation, even though the platform onto which it will be deployed are identical.

In the in-house model a Senior IT Manager may have authority and budget to force migration/upgrade of applications that rely on ancient components. In the outsourced model the service provider does not have that authority. In some cases it may not be viable to upgrade/replace a LOB application, and then you are stuck with it.

Perhaps mandating that all new services must support IE8/FF3/ /WebKit will force a change of default browser before XP goes EOL. IE6 can be kept for legacy internal applications only.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[Rich0]

Usually those support contracts contain clauses that cost the support provider money if your computers go down because they miss something in the upgrade.

That means that if you want them to push out an upgrade, you need to pay them to test all your apps, or waive their liability if you have a big mess.

All that cost is risk-aversion, and depending on your industry/etc it may actually be money well spent.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[Rich0]

That can be a very hard case to make when that "odd ball" software has 80% of the market share in its domain and has a feature list quadruple that of its nearest competitor.

Keep in mind that software compatibility isn't very high on the list of features the people who make purchasing decisions are concerned with. If that odd ball software allows the business to lay off 50 employees due to productivity improvements, then IT will be asked to support it.

Actually, most likely IT will just refuse to support it, so then the area buying the software will just hire some consultant to come in one-time and deploy a small server farm in somebody's closet. Then when the time for the first security patch comes along IT will be told that it is now their problem. Executive management will back the decision, and now IT is stuck trying to slowly move all that non-standard stuff into the datacenter, etc.

Unless you and everybody else in the same industry refuses to buy a software package that doesn't meet IT standards, then vendors won't care about this and you'll be stuck with non-standard software.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[rawler]

...then IT will be asked to support it.

Yes, and it's the job of IT to do an long-term impact analysis, and explain it to procurement. If the estimated long-term impact (for instance, staying on older, less productive and less safe browsers for longer time, requiring extra support staff, etc.), is still outweighed by the positive effect of using the "odd ball" software, then the software should obviously be used. The point is that the "odd-ball-software upgrade" should be budgeted a couple of years away, and "no, it's too expensive to upgrade related software" should not be a valid argument, since the cost were already budgeted in the acquisition of the blocking software.

Actually, most likely IT will just refuse to support it, so then the area buying the software will just hire some consultant to come in one-time and deploy a small server farm in somebody's closet.

Agreed. I've been there, on both sides, and I've been guilty of plain refusal, but it's hardly ever a good use of anyone:s time.

Plain refusal to cooperate means you just gain a new enemy, and it will almost always bite you or your organisation in the behind. Instead your response should offer motivated options; "Doing this is feasible, but will have these consequences:" If the organisation accepts those consequences (support costs, limited agility, ...) great. If not, then go back to the vendor and see if they can offer a solution. (Fix the problem, economic compensation, ...)

My point is that in my experience, these long-term effects are too often neglected, and "it works now" is usually good enough. For a small company with lower systems-complexity, that may be OK, but for larger organisations, it will cause problems.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[Anonymous Coward]

are you required by law to validate all software changes done to your system? Oh, yeah, sorry. Do you have any custom software written against IE6? Oh yeah, sorry. Do you lose your job if a major upgrade fails? Oh, yeah, sorry. Do you have to justify the upgrade costs when what you have now works? Oh, yeah, sorry. Is there a measurable cost of your users' time which will be lost by your upgrade process? Oh, yeah, sorry.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only "expensive" bit was a day of my time fixing issues with some rubbishy Java applet that is used in the library, which isn't very happy with IE8.

You got away lightly, perhaps the government is tied into legacy apps which need IE6.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[Rich0]

Agreed on all points. I consider my role to be one of making sure that those making decisions have all the information needed to make the best decision, and to make recommendations from my perspective. I then support those decisions.

I was aiming my comment more at those who seem to think that platform standards alone should dictate software decisions. It just doesn't work that way in the real world.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[rawler]

Not really no.

However, in my workplace, we have a pretty interesting setup, where corporate IT operate their Windows-based platform, and pretty strictly try to adhere to that.

In the local technology department, where I work, we however have end-user production on a mostly-streamlined CentOS platform. Whenever we encounter related needs for supporting systems (Customer, support, monitoring, issue-tracking, ...) we often take it on ourselves, instead of pushing IT, and then look for solution that fit our hosting platform, to not disperse operations staff too much.

So within the company, we mainly have two fairly streamlined platforms, with two separate staffings with skills for the respective platform. It works out quite well most of the time. Occasionally we readjust the responsibilities, when support-systems or business logic shifts focus/target group, sometimes leading to a systems-change, but only a system at a time.

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[mpe]

Definitely. Imagine 1700 users eager to break out of the firewall, eager to get to places they shouldn't do and to install programs that they're not allowed. At least government departments don't generally have people working in them who'd do anything to install crapware from the Net!

On top of that you have various pieces of "educational software" some of which can fairly be called "crapware". Which include the likes of trying to store things that should be per user as per machine or vice versa. Downgrading java/flash/etc on install (sometimes silently) because they can't cope with the concept of there already being a later version on the machine.

That's not including the 100 or so teachers and 100 support staff, some of whom would (and indeed did, until we blocked it) install anything they find with a "click here" button.

Some adults appear to be worst than children in this respect. Especially when some appear to believe that a laptop issued to them or simply present in the room they teach in is their personal property (except when it comes to taking good care of it.)

Re:Too expensive? Pah.

[TheLink]

> Nothing is standardised between departments,

Except Windows and IE6 I guess :).

To me it's a shame that they can't create web apps for government work that are more cross platform. I thought most of this stuff would just be filling forms and updating some stuff.

What happened to looking forward?

[DerPflanz]

I don't get it. if you run a organisation as big as the UK government IT department, you don't have a budget for maintenance? Part of the maintenance costs go to upgrades, bugfixes, etc. IE6 is an end-of-life product of about 10 years old. The costs of replacing it, should have been calculated and budgetted about 4 years ago (when IE7 came out). This isn't a case of 'we don't have money'. it is a case of 'we are too lazy to think further in the future than 1 month'.

Mismanagement.

Re:What happened to looking forward?

[phoenix321]

You can always save some bucks by postponing that oil change in your car. Until you have to change the entire engine because of that.

Re:UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need I

[dbIII]

While on the other hand a major Bank based in Australia just broke IE7 and firefox support for their pages only accessible by smartcard, turning it all into time consuming security theatre on IE6. Pull your finger out guys.

Costs? Look at the other side of the costs

[Anonymous Coward]

They forget to take a look at the other side of the costs: the maintenance costs of all web applications.
The costs of supporing IE6 vs. IE8 is huge. For example: You can't debug in a normal way in IE6, and it always behaves strange.

What I really want to know..

[evJeremy]

Who decided to build supposedly mission critical software as web apps to begin with, especially ones that only work in old versions of IE? It seems to defeat the whole purpose of using web apps in the first place (which I can't say I've ever understood the appeal of anyway).

Re:What I really want to know..

[ducomputergeek]

Let's wind back the clock about 8 - 10 years ago when a lot of these apps were being built. The available browsers under active development were MSIE and Opera. Netscape by that time was a dead duck with AOL not sure what to do with it and Mozilla wasn't much better and FireFox didn't even exist yet. And frankly Netscape/Mozilla had their own quirks.

MSIE offered ActiveX support which allowed companies to basically develop desktop like web apps using something very close to Visual Basic. And a lot of companies and other entities had VB programmers on staff or were easy to find. VB was the PHP of its day 10 - 15 years ago when you needed in house apps and frontends to databases.

By that time it looked to most as though Netscape was dead and MSIE was the internet for most companies, people, and places. And it didn't appear as though anyone was going to challenge them either and the browser wars were over.

What nobody saw coming wasn't FireFox, but Safari and Webkit. Apple not only created a browser for their platform, but then they went to banks and other places and helped (paid) them to make their sites more standards compliant so they would work with macs/safari. This helped FireFox as well since both browsers were standards based.

And if you're using IE, you deserve to get

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you're using IE, you deserve to get infected.

yes?

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[linebackn]

I have a bit of a mantra when I talk about IE6. Whenever anyone asks me why anyone would run IE6, I give this response:
Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. If they stop using IE6. They start losing 1 million dollars a day. Thats the reality of the situation.

That's about the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard. If this is your mantra, then you should not be employed anywhere, for any job.

That is only nonsensical if it is being supportive of the reality. The reality is unfortunate and stupid: If you stop using IE 6 for IE7/8, Firefox, Chrome, whatever but IE 6 was the only tool with which you could get your job done... then you are going to start losing money as productivity stops.

Of course it is idiotic to paint yourself in to a corner where you can only do your job with one specific tool if you don't have to. You put your business in serious risk if you do that.

Like the car analogy above, would you set up your business so you could ONLY ever use a Mercedes Vito van? That would be stupid. Your business would suddenly be unable to make money if it broke beyond repair and you couldn't get the exact same vehicle. Spend a little extra time and money so you can use any vehicle and reduce the risk to your business. Makes sense, but all people see is that they save a few bucks up front.

gchq must love something

[AHuxley]

deep in the MS code that they dont want to see gone.
No 29th 1948 "black friday' when the Soviets tightened up their one time pads and stopped all chat, used hard lines ect. for the MS age.
Less open MS, more work :)

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[kanad]

IE6 may be 10 years old but even today many software depends on it. In my company the QA tool is HP Quality Centre, a very expensive tool at that. It is a ActiveX control that only runs on IE 6 and IE 7 (that is if it doesn't crash every few hours). Several hundred man hours has been spent since many years to create requirements and test cases and it is not easy to replace it just for this reason alone. So IE 6 stays.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[takev]

I don't think it is actually about upgrading the workstations to IE8, this is about all the internal websites that have been created to work with nothing but IE6.

There are many companies that have these problems, they have their intranet stuff like registration of hours, personnel phonebook, documentation server, etc. All of these intranet websites have been bought from different companies, and they haven't upgraded these sites and some of these companies no longer exist. All these websites don't work with IE8, or firefox, or any other browser except IE6.

And even worse, often, after upgrading these websites, they no longer work on IE6. So you have to upgrade everything in one go; all the websites and all the workstations.

Launching boldly into last week

[HangingChad]

Their response seems to be that a fully patched IE6 is perfectly safe as long as firewalls and malware scanning tools are in place, and that mandating an upgrade away from IE6 will be too expensive.

The UK government stood on the brink of upgrading to last week's technology and decided this modern technology thing was moving WAY too fast.

Re:UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need I

[gdshaw]

IE8 is a standard. Microsoft making it pretty much makes it so.

IE8 has perhaps 20-30% market share currently, and it is about to be superseded. Not to be sniffed at, granted, but not enough to give it much weight as a de facto standard.

Even if you lump all versions of IE together (which from a web design standpoint you can't), its days of market-dominating influence are long gone.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[phoenix321]

If I earned a million bucks a day by using IE6, I would sure as Hell put half a million aside for upgrading to the next version of that browser or even migrate to a browser I can upgrade independently from the core operating system.

Eating all you earn and not planning one or two years ahead is a mistake that even in prehistoric times happened only once per tribe.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[phoenix321]

Let me introduce you to the heretical idea of sunk costs.

Having erroneously paid big bucks for something that turned out to be crap is no reason to keep eating shit all day.

If *Quality Control* software is crashing every few hours and holding back the whole company on upgrades, despite being ridiculously expensive, IT or procurement will have to stand up to some rather unpleasant questions some day anyway.

Re:UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need I

[91degrees]

Accurate stats aren't available but estimates put IE (all version) at between 43% and 63% of users.

So I'm not sure if I agree with your or not. That sort of share does mean you're obliged to consider Microsoft as some sort of alternative standard if you're a web developer, even if it doesn't mean that everyone else is forced to implement Microsoft's bugs.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[thegarbz]

That's about the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard. If this is your mantra, then you should not be employed anywhere, for any job.

Yet your post is one sided at best and naive at worst. If your company has 30000 employees who use tools that they quite heavily depend on that only runs on one particular application and you push out and update because "hahah I'm IT and I make the rules" which breaks everything then YOU should not be employed anywhere.

IT is an internal service. If IT just focuses on the enterprise (security, stability etc) at the expense of usability then the IT department should be dissolved and rebuilt (the reverse is also true). You the admin may push an update to IE6 to my computer once you have replaced all, and I mean ALL of the applications that depend on it, and in the fortune 50 company I work for that's actually a lot of web based applications. How you do it, and who funds it is none of my concern. This is a discussion for your department to make with upper management.

Don't forget, users are a nice and quiet bunch of people ... when everything is working.

Bah, the UK Gov isn't the only IE6 only haven...

[mike_art03a]

Bah, the UK Government is the only place where IE6 reigns supreme in government departments. A number of Canadian Government Departments still use IE6 and have some broken proxy config that only allows IE6 to connect to the net. I work in a military office tower and I used to be able to use FF Portable to cruise the net until they rolled out a new baseline system that only allows IE6 to work for web access thanks to some proxy config and they block out all IE Config access as well as a number of things. The funny thing is that in the last 2 months, we were hit with a nasty little bug twice that spread through the network and intranet thanks to IE6 exploits on all the WinXP machines on the lan.

Re:UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need I

[gdshaw]

Accurate stats aren't available but estimates put IE (all version) at between 43% and 63% of users.

That sounds about right, but don't forget that there is much more of a difference coding for IE6 versus IE7 than between (say) Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 4.0. For some purposes it makes sense to lump all versions of IE together, for others it doesn't.

So I'm not sure if I agree with your or not. That sort of share does mean you're obliged to consider Microsoft as some sort of alternative standard if you're a web developer, even if it doesn't mean that everyone else is forced to implement Microsoft's bugs.

There are two thresholds: the point at which you have to allow for Microsoft bugs, and the point at which you can rely on Microsoft bugs. We're above the first threshold still (for IE8 at least, maybe not IE6 any more), but for most purposes fell below the second threshold several years ago. That's what I meant by not dominating the market any more.

*Dropping* IE6 is too expensive?

[mrjb]

What about all the extra time and money it will cost to keep *supporting* IE6 with its broken CSS etc?

Re:*Dropping* IE6 is too expensive?

[TheLink]

Someone else's signature was on that OPEX?

Imagine you're some mid level person: you know the success rates of these large Gov IT projects. So are you going to put your signature on the proposal to upgrade to IE8?

No, you wait for some big guy at the top to propose it - that person probably gets benefits worth the risk. Whether fat bonuses or kickbacks.

You? You get a free mug maybe.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[dangitman]

Yet your post is one sided at best and naive at worst. If your company has 30000 employees who use tools that they quite heavily depend on that only runs on one particular application and you push out and update because "hahah I'm IT and I make the rules" which breaks everything then YOU should not be employed anywhere.

How does deploying Firefox remove the ability to run IE6?

IT is an internal service. If IT just focuses on the enterprise (security, stability etc) at the expense of usability then the IT department should be dissolved and rebuilt

What the hell does IE6 have to do with usability? If you'ev ever used any of these IE6 based web "applications" you would know that they are the least usable products on the market.

Don't forget, users are a nice and quiet bunch of people ... when everything is working.

Again, how does installing Firefox stop things from working?

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Stan Vassilev]

The blackhats, phishers, scammers, spammers, criminals, and other miscreants are not going to be easing up attacks anytime soon. So why deal with threats of 2010 with an OS made nine years ago?

You seem confused a little. The marketing/branding event "Windows XP" happened 9 years ago, yes. But the last time Microsoft updated Windows XP was few days ago, and they update it for today's threats, not those from 9 years ago.

Do you remember we had SP1, SP2 and SP3? SP2 was six years ago, pretty big update. SP3 is from only two years ago.

Of course, Windows Vista/7 can be more secure in some select scenarios, due to some select features it introduced. It's not as black as white as you want it to be.

P.S. Greek phalanxes and Apache helicopters are separated by about 3000 years, not 9 years, you get scores for drama, but I gotta take them back for lac of accuracy.

Wow, that many, huh?

[DaveV1.0]

Population of the UK: 61,414,062
Signatories: 6,000

0.01 percent of the population made this demand of the government which would have taken time and money to do. No wonder the government said no.

When free isn't free

[erroneus]

On the surface, IE6 is free as is IE7 and IE8. So why would it be "expensive" to upgrade? Oh yeah... the man-hours spent and the applications that depend on IE6 are also considerations to make. Hrmmm... This is just the first thought in the realization that not adhering to open standards could be a costly mistake and that vendor lock-in, even one as large and ubiquitous as Microsoft, can lead to an extremely costly future.

I wonder, then, if the UK Government will start to reach a conclusion similar to the London Stock Exchange with regard to Microsoft. While the reason to switch would be quite different, the general reason would be about the same -- "staying with this vendor can, has and will lead to disaster." Moving forward, using open standards that multiple vendors can participate in will lead to a more flexible situation where, once again, the decisions about where to go next is not in the hands of the vendor.

Why does this sound familiar?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a large Fortune 50 company, and our department (Corporate IT) is ironically about the only one still forced to be using IE6 due to an Oracle App that we have to use daily.
There is a "feature" to open new windows and pop ups that is completely borked in anything over IE6.
Meanwhile, our sales/end users are all getting shiny new Win7 laptops and happily continuing to screw them up...

Re:UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need I

[the_womble]

I have yet to come across a site from which I could not purchase using Firefox.

Government Austerity Programme

[Anonymous Coward]

When the government starts slashing civil servant jobs, I suggest they start with those responsable for giving them this advice. After all they won't be hurt at all. Their M$ salaries should be enough to live on comfortably.

counterproductive

[Anonymous Coward]

Behind all this are a limited number of developers trying to push a bunch of souped-up html and css crap that isn't wanted or needed on the web.

It's quite likely that the British Govt are well aware of this and are used to the shrill voices of small interest and pressure groups trying it on.

From wikipedia -
For most businesses and organizations, the likely survival of IE6 means that support for the way it renders content is an important part of their approach to the web, whatever the impact on transient technologies and standards.

posting anonymously to avoid the karma backlash from the kind of zealots that sign this kind of petition

Re:UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need I

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you can't run IE6 because you have a newer version of Windows, or if you simply don't use Windows at all?

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a bit of a mantra when I talk about IE6. Whenever anyone asks me why anyone would run IE6, I give this response:
Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. If they stop using IE6. They start losing 1 million dollars a day.

Good implementation of the Chewbacca defense up there, but you forgot the ending, which snaps all the pieces together: "Now think about it; that does not make sense! None of this makes sense! If they lose 1 millions dollars a day, you must agree!"

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[spyingwind]

It's rather simple. The "programmers" of the IE6 only web applications, didn't know how to write WC3 compatible HTML. Now that there are more applications, that need to be rewritten for IE8, than they can handle. It's kind of like this; Where I work it took 1 year of one programmer's time to convert 2 web application to work correctly with IE7 and IE8 and Firefox and Safari. Multiply that by how many web applications the UK has and you can quickly see how daunting the task is. What should have been done and what needs to be done are two different things. When I write any HTML I have my PHP change the HTML depending on what browser is viewing it. The short: Stupid programmers...

No cost-benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK government ran a 2-year, £250k, cost-benefit analysis, which concluded that IE6 was just as cheap as IE8, but upgrading would cost the government £10k. With this at hand, they decided that it wasn't worth it.

Re:Lifting the Lid on the Guilty Yid

[Anonymous Coward]

a little inside info for ya - this post originates from the same ip as whisperJeff - a frequent contributor to this site.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you work at an organization whose head is so far up it's ass that it hasn't decruftified the IE6 apps, you'll probably be glad to be fired. Are there *really* places that haven't updated their internal apps in the 4+ years since IE7 came out?

Re:Cleanup "not prudent, but paranoid"

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

I call B.S. on the paranoid bit, they are simply being realistic in the strange world of business IT. Crappy systems acquired incrementally over a decade by random contractors was tested for acceptance, piecemeal. Every one of them built for IE6 and only IE6. Those contractors are long gone. Anyone who knows anything about the applications, is likely also long gone, did they keep source code? not likely. Now to upgrade, they have to go back over a decade's worth of deployments and re-test and re-certify. That's expensive. And if the people on staff are just those who run recipes and tell people how to hold the mouse, that means hiring consultants to do the re-certifications. so are you willing to spend a few billion, upgrading from IE6 to IE8? What is the benefit to tax payers? pretty minimal imo.

The problem is that the "IT Architecture" used by most organisations is "something that works on what we have now" without the slightest appreciation of how ephemeral "now" is. Most organizations don't give a rats behind for open standards, and the result is the common rats nest, which is paradise for contractors and vendors. It's lock-in through entanglement.

Those people who refused are very rational, and very trapped. Their problem is the result of rampant ignorance and very poor decision making, but it is typical of many large organizations.

I have no problem with this

[ChrisDevine]

as long as every machine using IE6 is blocked from any access to the outside internet. Using IE6 with its 23 unpatched advisories ranging from exposure of information to system access in this day and age, especially on a government computer, is just idiotic. My current employer had been using IE6 along with "reputable" virus/malware protection, firewall, etc and the machines facing the internet (as opposed to solely the intranet) were riddled with trojans and malware. Simply having them installed, especially if the user doesn't understand them and may be able to bypass them, is simply not enough with all the malware floating around.

I work in a gov dept...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and the call for upgrading to IE8 is loud across many branches of the civil service. There is a large ecosystem of legacy software where I work and that's just one department from many, each with their own custom, often proprietary software enviroments. I can see what a nightmare it would be to even consider any kind of upgrading of core software like IE6 but we are already at the point where some of the sites on the intranet are not fully compatible with it. It seems to be that those working at the cutting edge of intranet development do not take IE6 into consideration or are not aware of the internal dependancy on it. I can see a point when either the intranet starts to fracture into intanets or forced upgrades happen.

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

lol i'm surprised they even bothered replying!!!

who gives a flying monkeys' about a few nerdy gimps that want to inflict their shitty css designs on the rest of us.

IE6 is just part of the web and it isn't going anywhere. keep your laggy pages to yourselves thankyou very much!!!

Good Until 2014

[pgn674]

Microsoft will be supporting IE6 until support for Windows XP SP3 expires, which is April 8, 2014. IE6 isn't going away for a while.

Lifecycle Supported Service Packs

Microsoft Support Lifecycle

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, isn't the central purpose of a browser to view thei Internet? With more and more sites dropping support for IE6 those who are still stuck using it are increasingly going to be shut out. I am a web developer and my company has not offered support for IE 6 on new sites for about two years. We offered clients the choice to cover the extra costs of making things working IE6's buggy backward and broken rendering engine, but clients didn't want to pay for that so we don't support it. I can't express how backward I think the attitude expressed by many commenters here is. It would be one thing if IE6 had any merit, but it is garbage. Why keep garbage around when every other choice is better? Stop holding back the Internet and move on.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[mlts]

Yep, I heard of this called the "throwing good money after bad" fallacy. People need to realize that if they sank $BIGNUM of dollars, euros, or adena into something smelly and useless, throwing more money will likely just mean that the added cash is wasted, and the smelly/useless item is still smelly/useless.

I won't fault Microsoft on this decision by the UK any more than I'd fault Sun if some organization is still on SunOS 4.1.4 and whining about exploits from 1991, or some organization still using RedHat 5.2. Time goes on, and unless one is running an embedded system that is thoroughly tested and isolated from the Internet, one has to keep upgrading if they value security in any way, shape, or form.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[mlts]

I've seen companies and government sites in the US still force IE6, and even use JavaScript/VBScript to check for fake User-Agent fields.

These cases are easily addressed on a personal level, but not on an enterprise level -- Windows 7 has XP Mode and IE6, as well as redo logs, so one can browse those sites in the VM (as an ordinary user in the VM, not an admin), then dump all changes when done. On the enterprise level, perhaps the best thing is to have a Citrix VM whose sole job it is to allow people to run IE6 in an extremely locked down environment.

Estimates

[b4upoo]

It is very difficult to put potential losses into a dollar amount from a breach is software. One can bet that IE6 will be breached from time to time. And to me it is not an issue of austerity as use of commercial software is wasteful. Why not use Linux systems with inherently greater security as well as the fact that the Linux community has free software that would avoid the initial costs and updates for free as well?
              When it come to saving money governments are without a clue.

Long term - cheaper to upgrade?

[walterbyrd]

According to wikipedia:

Internet Explorer 6 was released on August 27, 2001

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Internet_Explorer_6

So this is a nine year old product, ancient in computer years, and a security, and standards disaster.

It's great to see the government trying to save some money, but is there not a point of diminishing returns? Newer software may not work that well on msie6.

US pound is SI unit? Weight is mass?

[KWTm]

A US ounce is 1/16th of a US pound, which is an SI unit equal to 0.45359237 kg.

Wait, what!? A US pound is a SI unit? Have you been smoking something, or have I? And since when did we get an SI unit that is equal to 0.45359237 kg?

I would agree that 0.45359237 kg weighs approximately one pound, on the surface of the earth. But otherwise your post smacks of "-1 Wrong". (Which is an SI unit equal to -1.333 Please Downmod Me.)

Could you then explain to me

[petit_robert]

why people can't simply use *two* browsers :

-IE6 for those apps that depend on it

-anyone of the usual suspects (Mozilla, Chrome, Opera...) for a pleasant navigation and the new applications coming on line.

Compared to a forced upgrade of the legacy applications, would it be so hard to teach even to very computer illiterate users? That would at least allow some progress.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[thegarbz]

How does deploying Firefox remove the ability to run IE6?

Sounds like you may have a job with smart people. My boss once called up IT because he couldn't figure out how to change the formatting of a table in word. Can you imagine rolling out multiple browsers to people who can't figure out how to bring up the properties in basic office apps? As networks get larger the lowest common denominator gets dumber. Personally I run Firefox with IEtab to get my results, but I'm often greeted with blank faces when people look over my shoulder and try and figure out what the tabs are across the top of the screen.

Quite frankly rolling out Firefox and telling people they need to IE6 for somethings (including the global intranet page) would be met with a baseball bat by most users.

What the hell does IE6 have to do with usability? If you'ev ever used any of these IE6 based web "applications" you would know that they are the least usable products on the market.

You're under the assumption that there is any other way. A lot of large enterprise software out there has only web interfaces, such as IBM's Maximo. Version 5 of Maximo was great, a citrix delivered client that worked beautifully. I have nothing but hate for the current version. In this case Usability does not imply better experience, it implies the damn application we depend on works.

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[thegarbz]

Updated? Dear dear, if only updating would solve something. We just updated our management of change system to the latest version from the vendor. Still doesn't play right with IE7/8 or Firefox. Forget migrating to a different vendor too, the data is not in an easy to move format. There are other web based apps too and you know what, they work just fine. So go tell the head of the IT department you want money to upgrade a fully working system when world+dog is currently strapped for cash and cost cutting at every corner.

And no I won't be glad to be fired from a Fortune 50 company which values it's employees and has created one of the best work environments I've ever seen.

Chase bank worse - demanded upgrade TO IE6

[xenoc_1]

Until a couple of weeks ago, chase.com had a message on their homepage "It's time to upgrade your browser, before July 18". When you clicked through to see the list of browser versions required after 18 July, IE6 was one of the supported browsers. It should have been one of the ones not supported after that date.

It'll take another decade before people are off IE6 at this rate.

MIcrosoft Security?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is not to like about Microsoft Security - aside from the fact that there is none.

Windows and IE6

[ITFishGuy]

I support windows on a daily basis. I find that it is named aptly as it is easy to break just like a window. Too many moving parts and the clowns at my office rush to deploy things they do not understand and it of course has ramifications that are long reaching and take a very long time to fix. This coupled with the fact that they deploy in mass and do not even verify it went without any problems only intensifies the affects. So with that many moving parts and the fact that it has issues, that MS screws with everything with each new release including the CLI, has seriously screwed with perms everywhere and finally the new feature where it send info on how you are using the software and a multitude of other data that I cannot locate specifically YET. For these reasons and having to learn everything all over again moves me to learning something else. Linux is something that I am moving toward. Yeah sure there is this standards thing between versions, but for the most part the CLI isn't all that different and I can count on it. So back to IE, firstly never tie your browser and your OS that's asking for trouble in my opinion. Browser flaw leads to OS flaw and vice versa. Why would you set such a thing up. Your browser is a public facing application, your OS should be a private facing matter. MS has made the OS more secure? Hmm, well the browser still functions as it did and it's so secure now it takes a multitude of tweaking to access COM+ items just to fix them. If you are going to make that kind of move ensure that your COM+ items don't need fixing. If I were the UK I'd be looking for another OS. I myself am moving to Linux on all the home machines. Sure I'll have to learn something new, but I am being forced to do that every few years anyway on a much grander scale, so I might as well move to something that I can bank on it's foundation not changing so much.

Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw IE and start using Chrome and Google Apps

Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day.

[Anonymous Coward]

when world+dog is currently strapped for cash and cost cutting at every corner.

...a Fortune 50 company which values it's employees and has created one of the best work environments I've ever seen

you contradict yourself.

your work environment sounds like hell, they couldnt pay me enough to do your job. kudos to you if you enjoy it; but I'd rather be unemployed before I got stuck at a place where IE6 was still in the SOE