Slashdot Mirror
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.
Methinks! Oh, and IE6 is terrible. But then again, so are IE7 and IE8.
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 liberals got it exactly right. For years now they’ve been telling us how “vibrant” mass immigration has made stale, pale White societies. Well, London was certainly vibrating on 7th July and that got me thinking: What else have the liberals got right? Mass immigration “enriches” us too, they’ve always said. Is that “enrich” as in “enriched uranium”, an excellent way of making atom bombs? Because that’s what comes next: a weapon of real mass destruction that won’t kill people in piffling dozens but in hundreds of thousands or millions. Bye-bye London, bye-bye Washington, bye-bye Tel Aviv.
I’m not too sure I’d shed a tear if the last-named went up in a shower of radioactive cinders, but Tel Aviv is actually the least likely of the three to be hit. What’s good for you ain’t good for Jews, and though Jews have striven mightily, and mighty successfully, to turn White nations into multi-racial fever-swamps, mass immigration has passed the Muzzerland safely by. And mass immigration is the key to what happened in London. You don’t need a sophisticated socio-political analysis taking in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Jewish control of Anglo-American foreign policy, British colonialism, and fifteen centuries of Christian-Muslim conflict. You can explain the London bombs in five simple words:
Pakis do not belong here.
And you can sum up how to prevent further London bombs – and worse – in three simple words:
PAKI GO HOME.
At any time before the 1950s, brown-skinned Muslim terrorists would have found it nearly impossible to plan and commit atrocities on British soil, because they would have stood out like sore thumbs in Britain’s overwhelmingly White cities. Today, thanks to decades of mass immigration, it’s often Whites who stand out like sore thumbs. Our cities swarm with non-whites full of anti-White grievances and hatreds created by Judeo-liberal propaganda. And let’s forget the hot air about how potential terrorists and terrorist sympathizers are a “tiny minority” of Britain’s vibrant, peace-loving Muslim “community”.
Even if that’s true, a tiny minority of 1.6 million (2001 estimate) is a hell of a lot of people, and there’s very good reason to believe it isn’t true. Tony Blair has tried to buy off Britain’s corrupt and greedy “moderate” Muslims with knighthoods and public flattery, but his rhetoric about the “religion of peace” wore thin long ago. After the bombings he vowed, with his trademark bad actor’s pauses, that we will... not rest until... the guilty men are identified... and as far... as is humanly possible... brought to justice for this... this murderous carnage... of the innocent.
His slimy lawyer’s get-out clause – “as far as is humanly possible” – was soon needed. Unlike Blair and his pal Dubya in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombers were prepared not only to kill the innocent but to die themselves as they did so. And to laugh at the prospect: they were captured on CCTV sharing a joke about the limbs and heads that would shortly be flying. Even someone as dim as Blair must know you’ve got a big problem on your hands when there are over 1.6 million people in your country following a religion like that.
If he doesn’t know, there are plenty of Jewish journalists who will point it out for him. There’s the neo-conservative Melanie Phillips in Britain, for example, who never met an indignant adverb she didn’t like, and the neo-conservative Mark Steyn in Canada, who never met an indignant Arab he didn’t kick. Reading their hard-hitting columns on Muslim psychosis, I was reminded of a famous scene in Charles Dickens’ notoriously anti-Semitic novel Oliver Twist (1839). The hero watches the training of the villainous old Jew Fagin put into action by the Artful Dodger:
What was Oliver’s h
And:
Does make one wonder if the submitter or the editor even read it.
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. If the government stop using IE6, it costs them 1 Million British pounds a day. (Or whatever the correct currency conversion is.)
Thats why businesses and governments use IE6.
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
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...
(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.
You should use a real standard browser instead.
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.
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.
Upgrading to IE7 or any IE is free. Just run Windows update.
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.
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
IE8 is the patch to IE6.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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]
IE6! Let it never die!
Seriously, having used IE8, IE6 is much nicer in terms of the user interface.
Sad that something which appears so trivial turns out to be expensive.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
IE8 is a standard. Microsoft making it pretty much makes it so.
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!"
"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?
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.
the world's best free flash games site
We're all waiting for you
http://www.oyun.su
oyun
oyun
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.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
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.
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.
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).
And if you're using IE, you deserve to get infected.
yes?
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
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
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.
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.
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.
What about all the extra time and money it will cost to keep *supporting* IE6 with its broken CSS etc?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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.
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...
I have yet to come across a site from which I could not purchase using Firefox.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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!!!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
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.
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.
What is not to like about Microsoft Security - aside from the fact that there is none.
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.
"With great power, come great responsibility." Now if those who had power followed that rule....
Screw IE and start using Chrome and Google Apps