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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 internet itself has become terrible.
And:
Does make one wonder if the submitter or the editor even read it.
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...
What's so bad about IE 8? I've not used it much but it seems quite usable.
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.)
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.
Assume I can fly...
Oh wait.
Upgrading to IE7 or any IE is free. Just run Windows update.
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.
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]
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.
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.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
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.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
...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
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 that something which appears so trivial turns out to be expensive.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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.
A lot of government computers still run NT4, so I think they have an answer to that question.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
90% of everything is terrible.
Except Ivan.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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 have yet to come across a site from which I could not purchase using Firefox.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
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...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
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).
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.
Interestingly, IE 9 seems to be following the rules for CSS and ES5, perhaps better than the other browsers. I'm cautiously optimistic.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....