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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.
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.
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.
Qxe4
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)!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
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.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
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.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
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.
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
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.
... when everything is working.
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
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:
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).