IE6 Addiction Inhibits Windows 7 Migrations

eldavojohn writes "As anyone in the industry will tell you, a lot of money went into developing web applications specific to IE6. And corporations can't leave Windows XP for Windows 7 until IE6 runs (in some way) on Windows 7. Microsoft wants to leave that non-standard browser mess behind them, but as the article notes, 'Organizations running IE6 have told Gartner that 40% of their custom-built browser-dependent applications won't run on IE8, the version packaged with Windows 7. Thus, many companies face a tough decision: Either spend time and money to upgrade those applications so that they work in newer browsers, or stick with Windows XP.' Support for XP is going to end in April 2014. In order to deal with this, companies are looking at virtualizing IE6 only (instead of a full operating system) so that it can run on Windows 7 — even though Microsoft says this violates licensing agreements. IE6 is estimated to have roughly 16% of browser market share, and due to mistakes in the past it may never truly die."

Comments

What do you expect?

[obergfellja]

When people get comfortable enough with something, they don't look for new products to replace it. IE is just another reason why people don't change.

Re:What do you expect?

[bunratty]

The problem was that IE had a 95% share of the market, so developers thought they could get away with developing web applications that would work only on IE 6 for Windows. And, of course, they did. The companies that bought these applications because they didn't realize this would mean that the applications would not work in other operating systems, other browsers, or even other versions of IE are now stuck with IE 6, which means they're stuck with Windows XP. It's worse than vendor lock-in. It's vendor/version lock-in.

Re:What do you expect?

[Monkeedude1212]

When people get comfortable enough with something, they don't look for new products to replace it.

This is what I don't get:

People are willing to put in the money and effort to try and virtualize IE 6 but the same amount could probably have gone in to upgrading their web application to run on IE8

Re:What do you expect?

[daid303]

It's vendor/version lock-in.

In other words, Microsoft overdid it. They just wanted to vendor lock-in not the version lock-in. And they are having a hard time recovering from it.

Re:What do you expect?

[mark72005]

If a prepackaged, working solution currently existed to virtualize IE6 and solve all these problems with just the receipt of a licensing fee, this would not be a story.

Similarly, if it were cheap to rewrite all these web applications for IE8, it would also not be a story.

Re:What do you expect?

[obergfellja]

Who are you gonna call? IE BUSTERS... i mean GHOST BUSTERS!!!

Re:What do you expect?

[Critical Facilities]

It reminds me of when I used to work for a very large, US based Financial Services Provider. They would waste so much money doing things in these roundabout, haphazard ways despite being shown very plainly how planning project progression carefully would save them money and heartburn. Of course, they'd never listen. So, we came up with what we felt best summed up their mission statement:

"There's never enough money to do it right, but there's always enough money to do it again."

Re:What do you expect?

[MachineShedFred]

You can do this with some of the management suites out there.

We'll be virtualizing all browsers on Windows 7 - be it IE6, 7, or 8.

Re:What do you expect?

[cynyr]

but you missed, re-training, lost productivity, re certifying, supporting, and probably a few other costs as well. Re-training and lost productivity are going to have major $$ values with them. If your app handles sensitive data and needed to be certified, any re-write will cause you to have to pay for that again as well.

In short it's not dev costs that are the issue.

Re:What do you expect?

[DJRumpy]

Eventually support for IE6 will be gone, and that is a concern for corporations. We considered virtualization under Win7 and rejected it for that reason. The out of the box solution to run XP VM is meaningless if XP support dries up, and it doubles the desktop footprint for the support areas. A nightmare in the making.

We are going through the painful process of rewriting and certifying IE6 specific apps and migrating to IE8. Only after that is complete will we migrate to Win 7.

Re:What do you expect?

[Goffee71]

Nah, I think the coders/devs/IT depts will see a world of money in upgrading all these old apps (think of it as the Millennium Bug Lite)

Plus, think of all the machine upgrades they can get away with in the name of system requirements and so on, its going to be a right old cake fest

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/coming-windows-7-update-heralds-death-of-ie6-finally-009013.php

Re:What do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sensitive data and IE6 in the same sentence.. lol..

Re:What do you expect?

[EraserMouseMan]

We're talking about custom corporate web apps here, folks. It doesn't matter if your web app runs perfectly on Mozilla/Netscape/Opara, etc. If your corporate IT standards mandate that all web-apps must run on the standard corporate-supported browser then that is what you develop the web apps for. Period. In that situation, back in the 2000 time-frame, the market share of IE in most large companies was 100%.

Re:What do you expect?

[xSauronx]

The hospital I work in *just* got their several thousand (think 6000+) workstations upgraded to XP. It took almost 2 years.

We're just *now* only beginning to roll out IE7 because it took a while to test vendor apps and make sure things would work for IE7....a few machines are keeping IE6 because they have something that doesnt.

IE8 support isnt even a considering at this point, and probably wont be for the foreseeable future. Windows 7 couldnt happen if they wanted it to...a lot of the workstations are too old and underpowered to run it well, and much of the hardware certainly isnt going to be supported in any way.

Its crap, but theres not really a good way around it with that many workstations unless you have a boatload of money to dump into it.

Re:What do you expect?

[Monkeedude1212]

I never said it was cheap - but you basically nailed it; If the option were to spend the money licensing a Virtual IE6 or spent rewriting the apps - what would companies do?

Lets say it takes you 6 months and 3 programmers at 80k annually to rewrite the software - so 120k + the cost of not having them work on other projects.
Or you had the alternative to license virtual IE 6 at 30 dollars a month per machine. Lets say you've got 500 PC's in your company.

Your money breaks even after 8 months, and the first option cuts off your spending and has a higher probability of lasting longer. If you want another 2 years out of your product, are you willing to spend 240000 dollars just to save your 3 programmers 6 months of time?

Re:What do you expect?

[StuartHankins]

+1 Insightful, not funny. Most companies BTW want some sort of vendor lock-in it's just that it can be done in different ways: Consistent good experience, support options, problem escalation, fewer defects, ease of use, ease of integration etc. Not that all of these necessarily apply in this situation. It's better to have your customers want to use your product than feel forced to use your product.

Re:What do you expect?

[MightyMartian]

It's the best road, providing you stick to the standards as much as possible. If your web apps are as loosely tied to a specific browser as possible, you won't have this issue in the future. I doubt true blind portability for most apps is impossible.

For better or for worse that's why I'm pretty much redoing all our web-apps in Joomla. I'm not really all that big a fan, because it adds that layer of bloat, but at least dealing with browser-specific oddities is someone else's problem.

Re:What do you expect?

[VGPowerlord]

If a prepackaged, working solution currently existed to virtualize IE6 and solve all these problems with just the receipt of a licensing fee, this would not be a story.

Even better, virtualize the entire OS it runs on since IE6 is such a security hole.

We could call the feature Windows XP Mode and include it with the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows.

Oh wait, Microsoft already did that.

Re:What do you expect?

[Monkeedude1212]

You don't need to retrain someone to use the app - its the exact same application it just runs in a different browser. You don't need to worry about re-certifying and supporting because you'll have to do that with a virtualized system anyways.

I made a post a bit futher up about how you basically save money in the long run by simply paying the dev costs for that upgrade as opposed to a licensing solution. Licensing something to run an obsolete product is a terrible idea, there are very few circumstances where it would even make sense financially.

Re:What do you expect?

[Sique]

People are willing to put in the money and effort to try and virtualize IE 6 but the same amount could probably have gone in to upgrading their web applications to run on IE8.

Not necessarily. If the web application you are running within IE 6 is for instance the management interface of some machine (lets say a large telephony switch or a CAD/CAM system), you are not in a position to ever replace that web application and roll your own.

You are stuck with either supporting IE 6 on at least some machines necessary to maintain the machine, or you replace your machine with a new one - which might get much more expensive than keeping IE 6 virtualized somewhere.

Re:What do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

fast/cheap/good, pick two.

A decade ago, these companies were content with fast and cheap. Sucks for them.

Re:What do you expect?

[thetoadwarrior]

and any sensible company would do the smart thing and foot the bill to get out of the horrible mess before risking the day coming where they can't get it to run at all or get sued by MS for violating the licence.

Re:What do you expect?

[aureus620]

I think you're underestimating the amount of manpower/time it would take to migrate some legacy applications. Think more along the lines of 2+ years, and several dozen programmers. Now multiply that by half a dozen or so legacy applications. Suddenly virtualization isn't that bad of an option.

Re:What do you expect?

[Volante3192]

In other words, Microsoft overdid it. They just wanted to vendor lock-in not the version lock-in. And they are having a hard time recovering from it.

MONKEY PAAAAAAAAAAAW!!!!

Re:What do you expect?

[obergfellja]

unless you put hacked or some negative term in there, it doesn't equate.

Re:What do you expect?

[jgagnon]

This is probably moot, but Windows 7 can actually be set up to run nearly (very nearly) as well as XP on the same hardware. There are a few things you'd have to shut off and other tweaks to be made, but it actually does run well on the older hardware. As long as you are running the 32-bit version (highly recommended for cases like yours) then drivers shouldn't be a huge deal.

Having said that, I fully understand why your workplace would not upgrade past XP. We're still on XP here even though Windows 7 32-bit runs everything we use here (with a couple minor, limited-use exceptions). Mostly because we have no profitable reason to leave XP behind. We'd still be running the same applications on 7 that we run on XP, so why upgrade?

Re:What do you expect?

[Monkeedude1212]

I think you're overestimating it.

But I don't have anything besides anecdotal evidence to back up my claims (As those were the estimated times for upgrading OUR legacy applications).

Re:What do you expect?

[Tim C]

You forget that this is Slashdot, where anything even vaguely critical of Micro$oft is very much a story...

Re:What do you expect?

[Monkeedude1212]

If you find yourself in a position where you are limitted by something like that - you're better off just keeping a regular XP box running and supporting it yourself than you are virtualizing IE6 on Windows 7.

Re:What do you expect?

[BlackSnake112]

XP mode has been out for a while. It is free to download and use if you have the enterprise, ultimate, or pro version of windows 7. We have used it for a few old web based apps with no issue. The issue was the users tried dragging and dropping items from windows 7 into the XP mode app and it would not work. Other then that nothing after 14 months.

Re:What do you expect?

[bws111]

It isn't really that simple though. Let's say you have several applications affected by this. It is pretty obvious that you are not going to go home Friday and come back Monday to find that not only have all the applications been upgraded, but also all the PCs in the company have been upgraded to a newer browser. So that means that you have to support both the IE6 version and the new standards-compliant version for some period of time (the length of time between the rollout of the first compliant application through the rollout of the last compliant brower). That is probably on the order of years.

The next problem is that people are used to the IE6 version. The new compliant version better look and act exactly the same, or people are going to make mistakes (especially experienced people who never have to actually look up at the screen).

Throwing money at the problem (licensing the virtual IE6 images) is probably the most prudent thing to do, from a business perspective.

Re:What do you expect?

[jgagnon]

Windows XP mode on older hardware sucks royally. Windows 7 can run fine in a 1 GB machine, but try running XP Mode on top of that and see what you get. Now try it again on a 512 MB machine (and a lot of companies still have them - we have at least a dozen 2.4 GHz P4's with 512 MB of RAM).

Re:What do you expect?

[Rob Riggs]

One word describes most of the IT departments in the US: underfunded.

Re:What do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd still be running the same applications on 7 that we run on XP, so why upgrade?

Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

Blah blah updates blah... nobody cares.

Re:What do you expect?

[nschubach]

Violating the license how? By still using XP?

Re:What do you expect?

[a2wflc]

My IT dept won't see a world of money. We will PAY a world of money. Dozens of apps used by 10,000s of people around the world. Upgrade, qa, and extra support after deploying the upgraded apps will cost A LOT. And Microsoft isn't offering to pay for it so it comes out of our budget. And while we're doing that we are not building new apps that the company needs. New apps work with IE8 & FF and major upgrades to old apps include upgrades for browsers. But lots of apps have been around 5+ years and have no upgrades planned.

Re:What do you expect?

[Rich0]

These are all big corporations who buy tons of windows licenses.

MS isn't going to sue them because they are running a bunch of IE6-apps on copies of IE6 that they paid for via XP licenses, on copies of Windows 7 that they pay licenses for, supported by Active Directory and Exchange servers that they pay licenses for and client licenses for, etc. Oh, and the reason they're doing it is because MS stopped taking their money for XP extended support contracts and instead they're paying for Windows 7 extended support contracts.

MS would be suicidal to file legal action against companies like this. They're EXACTLY who keeps them in business. No, they're going to do everything they can to make the migration path as smooth as they can. The IT guys at these companies can pick up the phone and have engineers at their beck and call any time they want - they are MS's bread and butter and they know it.

Sure, MS would prefer to leave IE6 behind, and no doubt they'll do what they can to get people to move on. However, the worst they'll actually do is remove official support - they won't be suing their customers.

Re:What do you expect?

[Jimmy King]

Nice, you actually got to do it again? I'm pretty sure the mission statement where I work is: "There's never enough money to do it right, but there's always enough salaried employees to work overtime maintaining the mess."

Re:What do you expect?

[Mordaximus]

The problem was that IE had a 95% share of the market, so developers thought they could get away with developing web applications that would work only on IE 6 for Windows. And, of course, they did.

I'd blame it more on the breed of "VB 6 for dummies" "developers" that also emerged around that time, that had no clue what a mess they were making.

Re:What do you expect?

[canajin56]

If a prepackaged, working solution currently existed to virtualize IE6 and solve all these problems with just the receipt of a licensing fee, this would not be a story.

It is, XP mode is built into Windows 7 Ultimate/Business. You just have to install it. It's free, no licensing fee at all. Just install it, set apps to run in XP mode, and it's handed by a virtual machine in the background, and you get the window just like any other application, right on your desktop. All you need is Windows 7 Business, which I'm sure is what businesses have if they are big enough to have legacy web apps. And a CPU that supports HW virtualization, which any new one will. While IE6, in theory, could prevent you from upgrading to Windows 7 on an existing machine, if it's CPU is too old, it's no reason to avoid it on new machines. They can run IE6 just as well as XP does.

Re:What do you expect?

[rickb928]

Back then, the real problem was that:

- IE6 was optimized for ASP (or was it ASP optimized for IE6, so confusing).

- Many businesses used ASP for Web-based apps.

- So many businesses were dependent on the IE6-ASP integration.

- And many businesses wanted reliable Web services, so a browser that worked well with ASP was very desireable.

This is all pretty well-known to anyone developing back then, as recently as 2006 actually, and is not news. That so many business users are still developing to IE6 is unfortunate, but given the cost of adapting to multiple browsers (and the futility of doing so) it isn't really so surprising. Add in the uncertainty that the *next* version of IE won't be compatible with sites written to accomodate previous versions, and this is an impossible situation no one really bothers to talk about so much, unless you're a designer or programmer. Or an escalation tech. Or a manager with a finite budget for your web services.

Rather than explain the situation as "developers thought they could get away with developing web applications that would work only on IE 6", perhaps you should explain it as "developers thought they could get away with developing web applications that would WORK".

So blame the developers for doing what worked, given the alternative which didn't exist at the time.

Re:What do you expect?

[John Hasler]

We are going through the painful process of rewriting and certifying IE6 specific apps and migrating to IE8.

Do you mean that you are going to lock yourself into IE8, or that you are going to rewrite and certify to standards?

Re:What do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Similarly, if it were cheap to rewrite all these web applications for IE8, it would also not be a story.

Don't rewrite it for IE8! You'll fall into the same trap! Rewrite it for ANY modern browser!

Re:What do you expect?

[marcosdumay]

Funny thing is, it does exist a solution for running IE6 on a modern OS, and doesn't even require a licensing fee (besides IE6 licensing, that those companies already have). The downside, it only runs on Linux.

Re:What do you expect?

[KingMotley]

IE6/ASP wasn't really optimized for each other.

However, you are correct in that developers were using technologies that ONLY existed in IE6, and had no alternative in any formal standard on how to achieve the same goal because Microsoft was delivering what developers needed, and the standards bodies were too busy arguing about useless stuff. Standards are great, but they need to be there in a timely manner, something that they often simply are not. They came too slow, too late, and then expect everyone else that has already been doing it, has developed code, and has released products on it before they were standardized. You were either forced to not deliver anything and say well there is no standard way to do it, or you did it the non-standard way, and delivered.

Everyone wants to blame Microsoft for everything, the real blame is on the standards bodies.

Re:What do you expect?

[Beetjebrak]

I don't blame the developers. I blame management for having their collective heads up their collective behinds for literally *YEARS* while the world was changing around them. The writing has been on the wall since at least 2006 that IE would irrevocably move on at some point in the future. That gave companies *FOUR YEARS* of time to plan, develop, test and smear the budget out very thinly over the 16 quarters that have passed already. At this point there are another three years yet to come. Companies that still don't get their crap together by 2014 deserve to be put out of their misery.

Re:What do you expect?

[yuna49]

Does that painful process include rewriting the apps so they work with Firefox, Opera, and elinks as well? So that they conform to open standards and are browser-neutral? Or are you continuing to lock yourself into a single platform and rewrite them only for IE8? If so, why? Too expensive to go browser-neutral? You see Microsoft in your future for many years still to come? Your developers only know the Microsoft way? Corporate politics? I'm sure there must be others.

I'm sincere in asking this question since I've stuck with open standards and open technologies since the mid-1990's. I had a conversation about this subject here just a few days ago. I rely on server-side intelligence for most applications and use the browser merely as a display device. My limited understanding of this issue is that problematic IE6 applications use now-unsupported functionality on the browser.

Can you leave the infrastructure more or less intact but make the interface browser-neutral?

Re:What do you expect?

[AltairDusk]

I would hope you're developing to W3C standards and not specifically IE8 or you may run into similar problems in the future.

Re:What do you expect?

[CyprusBlue113]

And they now see what that kind of thinking gets them, large costs down the road.

Re:What do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than explain the situation as "developers thought they could get away with developing web applications that would work only on IE 6", perhaps you should explain it as "developers thought they could get away with developing web applications that would WORK".

Not really. Web applications designed with standards compliance and browser compatibility in mind (or at least something other than IE6 on windows) worked just fine back then. I wrote a web app for internal use at a particular company in 2002 and it is still being used today in modern browsers.

The main thing causing this problem is that developers working inside large non-tech corporations tend to be complete idiots (i.e. those who wrote these IE6-specific web apps).

Re:What do you expect?

[DJRumpy]

Of course they will be written to standard. They went through the pain once, they would be foolish to make the same mistake twice.

My company has shown no interest in Firefox, Chrome, or any other browser. They are satisfied with the boxed IE solution, and for day to day tasks, it gets the job done, which is, I suspect, enough. It also removes additional work on the legal side and reduces the support footprint. It doesn't require additional NDA's with various browser companies if support issues should arise and all security updates come from the same vendor. We've always been an MS shop, and I don't see that changing significantly any time soon. I was surprised that they are considering a few linux boxes for a few open source applications though. Historically they have avoided linux, so there is always hope.

Re:What do you expect?

[Oligonicella]

It's so nice to see the slash pool being diluted with adults.

Re:What do you expect?

[bberens]

It's not as if you could develop "to standards" and expect IE6 to run your webapp. I think people forget that during the early years of IE6 there wasn't a lot of "good" standards compliance running around in browser land. So what else were the developers to do besides develop towards the 90%+ marketshare browser?

Re:What do you expect?

[bberens]

[tangent]
My company is just now starting to migrate away from Visual Studio 6. This year we switched from Visual Source Safe, next year we're moving away from VC++ 6.0.
[/tangent]

Re:What do you expect?

[VGPowerlord]

Windows XP mode on older hardware sucks royally. Windows 7 can run fine in a 1 GB machine, but try running XP Mode on top of that and see what you get. Now try it again on a 512 MB machine (and a lot of companies still have them - we have at least a dozen 2.4 GHz P4's with 512 MB of RAM).

I was under the impression that they would upgrade to Win7 during a hardware refresh.

Re:What do you expect?

[Lennie]

And you think this is only true in the US ?

Re:What do you expect?

[bberens]

The truth about business is that having their "collective heads up their collective behinds" is that it's good business. You don't spend money until you absolutely have to. These are business intranet apps, not core business solutions where it's wise to spend some R&D on these sorts of things. Technology changes so quickly that trying to predict what browsers would look like today would have been a foolish exercise. You have to remember, it was successful for them to NOT SPEND ANY MONEY WHATSOEVER upgrading these webapps to new standards/browsers for the better part of a decade.

Re:What do you expect?

[NJRoadfan]

I'm sincere in asking this question since I've stuck with open standards and open technologies since the mid-1990's. I had a conversation about this subject here just a few days ago. I rely on server-side intelligence for most applications and use the browser merely as a display device. My limited understanding of this issue is that problematic IE6 applications use now-unsupported functionality on the browser.

Wasn't the whole point of web apps to enable applications to be more portable, since they work in any web browser? They were likely better off writing this program as a Win32 app... it would likely still work with Windows 7!

Re:What do you expect?

[tixxit]

We are going through the painful process of rewriting and certifying IE6 specific apps and migrating to IE8. Only after that is complete will we migrate to Win 7.

Honest question: How much of a discount do you actually get from a developer for creating an IE8-only solution vs., say, IE8, Firefox, and Chrome?

Re:What do you expect?

[TheRaven64]

Microsoft won't do it themselves. That's what the BSA is for. And, yes, they have been stupid enough to do this in the past, so there's no reason to expect that they won't continue to do so.

Re:What do you expect?

[CyprusBlue113]

Yes, you could. Not bothering to code to standards and using broken mode, is exactly what got them to this point. Nothing has been forgotten, just people thinking short term.

Re:What do you expect?

[DrgnDancer]

I dunno. I was around the IT world at the time. It was certainly the case that IE was *the* standard corporate web browser at the time, but even then I recall reading a lot of articles about why writing apps that depended on a lot of these proprietary browser extensions was a bad idea. Precisely for most of the reasons it turns out to have been a bad idea.

People said "Sure it's the standard now, but what about ten years from now... After all Netscape was the standard five years ago."

People said "Even if IE stays the standard how do we know that Microsoft will continue to support all these particular extensions. They seem to still be trying to figure out their strategy in this market."

People said "All these extensions in the browser seem to be asking for security and stability problems."

Meanwhile companies blithely bought (or wrote) tons of these applications. It *never* really seemed like a good idea, except from the point of view that it was dead easy, and thus dead cheap, to do. Well, lots of companies did the dead easy, dead cheap, thing; and like most dead cheap options they got what they paid for. They're highly reliant on an insecure, unstable browser than is no longer the standard and only minimally support by Microsoft (who are going to drop even the "minimal" part soon).

Companies dug their own graves, and now try to blame Microsoft. Microsoft certain deserves part of the blame, they wrote the stupid thing after all, but to be fair to them it's not like they woke up one morning last week and decided to drop support. They said *years* ago that IE6 was a mistake, and that they couldn't keep supporting all the proprietary extensions. If It managers had read the writing on the wall then, they could have long since weaned their companies off of these apps with minimal quarterly impacts (or at the very least be well along on the process). Of course that would mean admitting they made a mistake in the first place.

Re:What do you expect?

[LWATCDR]

They should have used Java and done client server :)
Actually if they had they wouldn't have this problem. I am also not betting that there will be few XP only applications as well. XP was around for a very long time and a lot of people wrote apps to that Version of Windows.
Yep Microsoft screwed it's customer base pretty good on that one.

Re:What do you expect?

[weszz]

The hospital system I work in just moved to IE7 (at great pains) but THERE IS A SOLUTION! (12,500 workstations and 25,000 users)

VMware has a program called ThinApp (useto be Thinstall till they bought it)

This will visualize IE6 and 7. Microsoft and Citrix says this is bad, VMware tells us they have already gone though Microsoft Legal and cleared it with them completely, plus they will support you whereas Microsoft will not.

Citrix will tell you to build a 2003 server and send it out that way, Microsoft will tell you to make a virtual XP box and go that way. Both way too much overhead with virus scanning software, patching etc...

This could be the answer, and it does work. Thinapp is a pretty amazing program for $10 per device.

We are looking at doing a full Win 7 migration based on Microsft's App-V and Thinapp with some apps on our Citrix servers, and our support will drop like a rock after it.

Rebuild a PC and the apps get sent to it virtually, so we would be able to rebuild a Pc in under 30 minutes from the start of re-image to completed. Right now we are at about an hour to get from kicking off the re-image to all the vertical apps installed.

Re:What do you expect?

[rickb928]

And, it's good business to not spend money on what *might* be, and wait until it *is*. You forget, how IE works is not evident until it is released.

Actually this all fits under the heading "it worked, it still works, give me a reason to change". Running IE6 in a VM works, and is actually an interesting answer to a lot of problems. I run IE6 and IE8 in VMs, along with Safari, Opera, and Firefox, for testing. It is a blessing to start over with a few clicks instead of figuring out what went wrong with the browser. I'm only interested in the web app, and the direct impact on the browser. All else is not my concern.

Re:What do you expect?

[rickb928]

Back then, ASP was a good choice if you wanted a robust development platform. today, we have many choices. Not all of those survive browser updates unscathed, but many do.

Again, at the time, it was prudent.

Re:What do you expect?

[commodore64_love]

>>>And they are having a hard time recovering from it.

All Microsoft had to do was make IE7, 8, and 9 backwards-compatible with IE6. Even the competitor Opera has a mode to handle websites that mirror IE6's quirks.

I think the whole idea of virtualizing IE6 inside Windows 7 is silly.
Surely it was take less manpower to simply modify the company apps to work with IE8.

Re:What do you expect?

[Ciggy]

It's more likely to be will not may run into similar problems in the future

TCO of owning Windows just got bigger...^_^

Re:What do you expect?

[Lifyre]

The only reason to upgrade is going to be the limited hardware support of XP when it comes time to finally start replacing systems. This will become especially true if and when 32-bit systems disappear. In the mean time Microsoft is going to realse at least one more version of Windows and likely more.

Why upgrade now? Most companies are better positioned to wait for their hardware to provide the incentive to upgrade and survey the market at that point than to upgrade for ultimately artificial and minor reasons.

Re:What do you expect?

[yuna49]

Everyone wants to blame Microsoft for everything, the real blame is on the standards bodies.

I don't think so at all.

Berners-Lee's original draft for HTML appeared under the auspices of the IETF in 1993. By the end of 1995, HTML was already at version 2.0. The first W3C "recommendation," HTML 3.2, was released in January of 1997.

ASP 1.0 was released in December of 1996. PHP 1.0 had existed since June of 1995, and people were already writing web applications in existing languages like Perl before then. PHP 2.0 was released in November of 1997; I remember writing some PostgreSQL-backed applications in that language soon thereafter. This whole "there wasn't any alternative to Microsoft" perspective on early web application development that I've seen here recently on Slashdot has no basis in reality. If anything, the array of free tools and the pace of their development quickly surpassed anything Microsoft had to offer.

I also don't think you can exempt Microsoft from blame for whatever delays you might think took place in the W3C standards meetings either. After all, Microsoft had, and still has, a seat at the W3C table. At the time they wanted nothing to do with a standards-based Internet. This history of HTML at the W3C site makes for interesting reading about that early period. (Microsoft isn't the only guilty party here, of course. The first HTML "Editorial Review Board," set up when the more open IETF working group failed to reach a consensus, included representatives from IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, and the W3 Consortium. One outcome of these head-to-head negotiations was Microsoft trading away the MARQUEE tag in return for Netscape giving up BLINK!)

Re:What do you expect?

[DJRumpy]

Where in the post does it state we are moving to an "IE8-only" solution? I said we are moving to IE8.

Re:What do you expect?

[Sique]

We actually have some old Win98 boxes running because of old administration software which only runs on IE 5.5...

Re:What do you expect?

[Sique]

Main Problem being: What if the hardware of your XP box dies and new hardware is not supported by XP? You are running XP virtualized anyway then.

Re:What do you expect?

[amicusNYCL]

This will visualize IE6 and 7.

Why the heck would you want to do that? Wouldn't it be more effective to virtualize them?

Re:What do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bull-fucking-shit!

Re:What do you expect?

[jonbryce]

It's not like the millenium bug because there is no unmovable deadline to fix it. Even if support does end in 2014, Windows XP is still going to boot up and function just as it did before.

Re:What do you expect?

[TemporalBeing]

his will become especially true if and when 32-bit systems disappear. In the mean time Microsoft is going to realse at least one more version of Windows and likely more.

You mean like the 16-bit or 8-bit support disappeared? You do realize that even the latest x86/AMD64 processors still support the original 80086 processor modes, right? That that is their _default_ state of running when power is applied?

The only reason to upgrade is going to be the limited hardware support of XP when it comes time to finally start replacing systems.

Also, vendors seem to be continuing support for XP even as Microsoft drops it. So where is this limited hardware support you speak of? Not to mention that it's only been in the last few years that support for Win9x was almost completely dropped - yes, you can still find hardware that officially supports Win9x/Me, and that's a lot older than XP.

Re:What do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFS, n00b!

Re:What do you expect?

[GooberToo]

Its not like there was a shortage of people telling them not to do it. The made a bad decision which was trivially obvious a poor decision - even at the time. Its now time for them to pay for their blind, arrogant, and blatantly dumb decision. Expecting Microsoft to actively support legacy systems would be yet another poor decision.

Why was it obvious? Microsoft chased for monopoly abuse and sorta forced to compete. Web standards were obviously changing and improving and even at the time, Microsoft tended toward poor compliance. Microsoft had established themselves as king of poor Internet security, including in the browser. So on and so on.

Basically, if you are caught now, its because someone in your organization simply closed their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, and wished for the best. In turn, assuming that in that future, Microsoft would rule the world; or at least the Internet.

Re:What do you expect?

[dwalsh]

No, the ones who allowed the development or purchase of IE-only apps are incompetent and don't deserve more money. They placed the organization in a very poor strategic position.

Re:What do you expect?

[randallman]

The companies that bought these applications because they didn't realize this would mean that the applications would not work in other operating systems, other browsers, ...

It's not that they didn't realize it. I'm sure their geek employees were telling them it didn't work in Firefox, Safari, etc. Most of these companies deserve what they got themselves into. And many of them are repeating the mistake, just not with the browser this time.

Re:What do you expect?

[hairyfeet]

Oh Good Lord jumping Jebus on a hotplate! PLEASE tell me you're joking? do you have ANY idea how badly Java sucked back then? You have to remember we are talking PIII and some places even still having PII and 128-256Mb of RAM was quite typical. Me personally and many of the SMBs I worked for at the time had a "NO Java allowed!" policy back then because if you wanted the machine to seem to lock up solid for a good 5+ minutes all you had to do was launch a Java VM on a 733Mhz PIII to watch that sucker flail and thrash and just turn the machine into a worthless hunk o' metal.

In these days of even low end office machines being late model high end P4s or dual cores with 2Gb of RAM people forget just how damned slow we were at the time. My machine at that period was considered to be decently high end at a 1.1Ghz PIII with 256Mb of RAM and believe me launching a Java VM was so nasty I'd often just kill the browser rather than wait for the app to load. Not exactly the reaction most corps would want from their Intranet apps.

Re:What do you expect?

[Lonewolf666]

I think driver support will grow thin eventually. You might still be able to find officially supported hardware, but the days of picking something from the Dell or HP online shop and being sure it runs with XP will be over.

A few years ago, I tried to run my then-new PC with Windows 2000. But despite quality components I could not get the damn thing to run stable, while my older P4 ran fine with Win2k. Switching to XP solved the problem, so I suspect the reason was that driver developers had started to neglect Win2k driver development.

Ultimately, I guess most companies with non-replaceable IE 6 applications will end up sticking them and XP into some kind of virtual machine. Which could be a pretty long-lived solution after all.

Re:What do you expect?

[Skim123]

his will become especially true if and when 32-bit systems disappear. In the mean time Microsoft is going to realse at least one more version of Windows and likely more.

You mean like the 16-bit or 8-bit support disappeared? You do realize that even the latest x86/AMD64 processors still support the original 80086 processor modes, right? That that is their _default_ state of running when power is applied?

Perhaps what the OP meant is the limitations imposed by 32-bit systems, thereby prompting decision makers to choose a 64-bit system when upgrading the hardware? Say the new workstations being purchased have 4 or 8 or 16 GB of memory and here we have Windows XP, which can only see and use 2 GB. Time to roll in a 64-bit OS!

Re:What do you expect?

[camperslo]

I would have thought that HIPPA compliance alone would have been enough to force the entire medical profession far away from I.E. 6 and Windows. Has anyone ever counted the total number of vulnerabilities that have been seen over the life of that platform?

Continuing along that path seems crazy. Something tells me that if the people involved had demanded open source development and GPL licensing, app evolution would have come far faster and at much lower cost.

Perhaps a number of organizations/facilities can get together and fund development of open source solutions. Working collectively it should be far cheaper than going it alone. Surely some of the work has been done already?

- - -
I.E. 6, every bit as worthy a cause as preserving herpes to survive an extinction-level event

Re:What do you expect?

[LWATCDR]

Wow you must have had some craptasic java apps.
We have been using a java app in my office for the last 8 years everyday and it doesn't take hours to load.
We did have some gripping from stupid people about it being slow because it was java. It wasn't java that was the problem it was the fact that we had 50 users hitting PostgreSQL server hard that was running on a 300mhz PII with 256mb of ram!

BTW it is working fine right now backed by a 600 mhz PIII with 512 MB.
Love Linux and PostgreSQL when running old slow hardware.

Re:What do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when? I've been writing web apps for over 10 years now. The vast majority were not ASP. Even if you do use ASP that doesn't imply an IE6 dependency.

Re:What do you expect?

[BenoitRen]

Unfortunately, drivers can be a problem. A friend of mine can no longer play online with his Nintendo DS because the Wifi hotspot dongle that Nintendo sells has no drivers for Windows 7.

Re:What do you expect?

[TemporalBeing]

Windows XP, which can only see and use 2 GB. Time to roll in a 64-bit OS!

WinXP can see more than 2 GB. We have systems that use 3 GB; we'd put 4 GB in but there's something wrong with the BIOS so it only sees 3GB. I am aware of other XP systems that have 4 GB, and with PAE it can see more than 4GB too.

Of course, Windows still takes up 1/3rd of the RAM for itself. but that's a different issue.

Re:What do you expect?

[Skim123]

Ah, I didn't realize there was a 64-bit version of Windows XP, but it turns out that there is one. So I guess I'm not confused at the OP's initial comment on why people would ditch WinXP when moving to 64-bit architectures.

Re:What do you expect?

[rickb928]

Ok, so you didn't do ASP. What did you do before Java? Did you work with data-intensive sites, such as customer-service or dispatching sites, or inventory control?

ASP doesn't require IE6, but back when it was IE6 or Safari or Mozilla, using anything else besides IE6 meant a lot more work, and some stuff did not in fact work.

So it wasn't that long ago that an ASP developer pretty much wrote to IE6.

But seriously, there's a whole corporate world out there that did focus on ASP, and they needed it to just work. To add browser troubles on top of the rest of the Microsoft crap was just not worth the trouble.

It's not as if a lot of otherwise pretty smart people and some HUGE sites didn't also have problems moving to IE7-compatible code.

Re:What do you expect?

[jgagnon]

I thought the DS can access any hot spot so long as it was using WEP and only had issues with WPA and WPA2? My daughters' DSi's don't go online for that reason, because I refuse to run WEP. I have a multi-channel access point that I could set up a second connection for WEP, but I just don't want to risk my network. :p

Re:What do you expect?

[Lifyre]

Ever used WinXP-64? There is a reason people don't mention it much...

Re:What do you expect?

[Lifyre]

Yes that is there defaul states, I never said the support would disappear but that the systems themselves would. Can you still buy a new 80086 machine? There is a point where it isn't economical to continue trying to use them and neglecting the more modern technology. The point is that it is this time it is going to be hardware that prompts the change not software as it has in the past. As I said Microsoft will release at least one and probably more than one new version of windows before this comes to pass. I'd guess 5 to 10 years before hardware presents a tangible incentive to move away from XP.

Yes you can still find supported hardware on the retail level but how much of it is from large OEM outfits that can support an order of 100,000 units? And how long will they continue to offer those options?

Re:What do you expect?

[TemporalBeing]

WinXP x64 while available was not used very much and was known for having all kinds of problems. However, you don't need the 64-bit WinXP version to do what I was saying - PAE (Physical Address Extension) is something from the processor level that allows addressing +4GB of memory. Linux used it a long time ago; but Windows didn't until WinXP - and even then you had to have the right version for a long time. MS may have enabled it by default for WinXP SP3, not sure. But any how, it's available. Fortunately Vista 64 is a lot better than WinXP x64; though there are still some driver issues. Win7 improved on that I believe. And Win8 or Win9 probably won't have a 32-bit edition.

Re:What do you expect?

[BenoitRen]

Not everyone has a wireless network at home, and if they do, they may not want to open it up just like you for good reasons. The dongle is there to address both of these issues as it creates a hotspot that only Wii and DS systems you authorise can connect to.

Re:What do you expect?

[Skim123]

Well color me stupid. Thanks for the info. You can tell I've (luckily) not had to think or know anything about WinXP for many years now.

Re:What do you expect?

[jgagnon]

I guess I'm confused about the "drivers for Windows 7" thing. Is it a device you install on your PC that turns it into a hotspot for use by your DS/Wii? That's what it sounds like, I just want to make sure we're on the same page. :p

Re:What do you expect?

[BenoitRen]

Is it a device you install on your PC that turns it into a hotspot for use by your DS/Wii?

Yes, that's it. It plugs into a USB port.

Re:What do you expect?

[sjames]

It's not as if there weren't PLENTY of warnings that sooner or later that would come back to bite them in the ass, they just ignored them all and painted themselves into the corner as fast as they could.

The few apps developed way back then that worked on multiple browsers still work on the latest and greatest.

Re:What do you expect?

[sjames]

The standard SHOULD have specified that they run cross-browser even if they would only be used on IE6 in practice. The few apps developed that way then still work now on newer IE and Firefox, Opera, etc.

So in that sense, it mattered very much. Had they taken those steps then, they could be happy with IE9 now.

Re:What do you expect?

[KingMotley]

ASP was released in beta form to developers since 1994 at least, because that is when I started working with it which preceeded PHP by more than a year. PHP 1.0 that came out over a full year later wasn't even remotely competative to ASP, it didn't do nearly anything serious as it was quite literally designed for making pretty home pages, not serious business applications. It wasn't even until 1998 that PHP had more than 1 programmer working on it. Now, I'm going to stop right there, because PHP ISN'T EVEN A STANDARD.

And I'll post a small excerpt from the w3c themselves:

November 1995: The HTML working group runs into problems

The HTML working group was an excellent idea in theory, but in practice things did not go quite as expected. With the immense popularity of the Web, the HTML working group grew larger and larger, and the volume of associated email soared exponentially. Imagine one hundred people trying to design a house. `I want the windows to be double-glazed,' says one. `Yes, but shouldn't we make them smaller, while we're at it,' questions another. Still others chime in: `What material do you propose for the frames - I'm not having them in plastic, that's for sure'; `I suggest that we don't have windows, as such, but include small, circular port-holes on the Southern elevation...' and so on.

You get the idea. The HTML working group emailed each other in a frenzy of electronic activity. In the end, its members became so snowed under with email that no time was left for programming. For software engineers, this was a sorry state of affairs, indeed: `I came back after just three days away to find over 2000 messages waiting,' was the unhappy lament of the HTML enthusiast.

Anyway, the HTML working group still was losing ground to the browser vendors. The group was notably slow in coming to a consensus on a given HTML feature, and commercial organizations were hardly going to sit around having tea, pleasantly conversing on the weather whilst waiting for the results of debates. And they did not.
November 1995: Vendors unite to form a new group dedicated to developing an HTML standard

In November, 1995 Dave Raggett called together representatives of the browser companies and suggested they meet as a small group dedicated to standardizing HTML. Imagine his surprise when it worked! Lou Montulli from Netscape, Charlie Kindel from Microsoft, Eric Sink from Spyglass, Wayne Gramlich from Sun Microsystems, Dave Raggett, Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly from the W3 Consortium, and Jonathan Hirschman from Pathfinder convened near Chicago and made quick and effective decisions about HTML.

Now I think that's pretty clear. The HTML body was unable to keep up with innovating nearly as fast as Microsoft was pushing out tools and things that real companies needed. They were SOOOO far behind that it would be closer to say that there was no standard at all that was even close to representing the types of things that Microsoft was putting out tools to do at the time. Innovations came from both IE and Netscape and they were implemented and companies were using them YEARS before the HTML working group standardized anything near it.

If you need a solution TODAY, and there is no standardize way of doing it, then you can't blame commercial entities for providing it when the standards bodies won't get to it for a number of years. Blame the standards bodies for moving so slowly.

Re:What do you expect?

[fwarren]

The companies that bought these applications because they didn't realize this would mean that the applications would not work in other operating systems.

I don't think it would matter. I know when I did development I had a heck of a time if I told a customer that 80% of their users used IE and 20% used Netscape and I needed to spend time coding for both. Most were quite content for you to code for only IE. After all, it is what they ran at the office and what was on their computer when they got it from Dell.

And at any large business that spent many thousands of dollars on a large custom written system knew they were writing for IE only. After all, Microsoft would never pull the rug out from under them and they knew they could dictate what browser and version of java or activex component their employees would run. The mirgration from Win98 to WinME to Win2k to WinXP showed that IE and VB6 were rock solid, cross-platform products that Microsoft would always take care of.

Development was easy. IE 5.1 and Visual Basic 6 would live forever. Cheap computers, cheap programmers, and cheap network administrators. The good times will never end.

Re:What do you expect?

[jcl-xen0n]

It makes me think that in order to move large organizations away from XP, M$ is going to need to offer a pre-Cut-Down version of Windows 7 - with all the flashy extras turned off by default in order to run on the bare minimum. Mind you, if someone is using their workstation solely to access a web-based app, perhaps this is a good time for that organization to move to something lighter anyway - not a lot of point throwing processing power at such basic needs.

Re:What do you expect?

[mrvook]

A lot of these claimed incompatibilities are exaggerated. I used to work for the IT dept of one of the Big Four auditing firms. One of my personal projects during my time (against the will of management) was to setup Linux on my laptop and various aspects of our core loadset within Linux. In virtually all of the instances where IE6 was a claimed requirement - Iceweasel worked well with minimal glitches, and IE6 emulated in WINE worked in the few other scenarios. A lot of these decisions are made to appease whiney management and office workers - workers who make service calls because of unplugged printers or because their new Blackberry can't make calls because they never activated it on their carriers network.

Re:What do you expect?

[Ritchie70]

I realize it's a large, and no doubt heavily negotiated purchase, but is $10 per seat a real number or your own uninformed wild-ass guess?

Re:What do you expect?

[klui]

It seems like an interesting product. But I don't know where you get $10/client. Their website says their client works only with the suite, which is sold separately. Client is anywhere from $30-$60 and the suite is $6K to $8K for 1-3 year support. http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.105855800

Re:What do you expect?

[adolf]

That might be a solution with 12,500 workstations, but at my (much, much smaller) company it ain't gonna work:

According to VMware, it costs $5,000 to get started with 50 client licenses. And additional licenses are $39.

For those prices, it's more profitable to stick with XP for as long as possible, and then run things in virtualized XP Mode once the hardware catches up with the overhead (in the natural course of attrition and replacement).

Re:What do you expect?

[tixxit]

I assumed, since you said "we are going through the painful process of rewriting and certifying IE6 specific apps and migrating to IE8." You never mentioned going to a cross-browser solution, simply that you are migrating to IE8. I misunderstood.

Re:What do you expect?

[TemporalBeing]

Can you still buy a new 80086 machine?

Yes, though typically only for specialty environments. Intel still sells the 80086 processor. You can still get the i386 processor too, and boards that support them. But again, you're dealing with specialty not consumer products.

The point is that it is this time it is going to be hardware that prompts the change not software as it has in the past. As I said Microsoft will release at least one and probably more than one new version of windows before this comes to pass. I'd guess 5 to 10 years before hardware presents a tangible incentive to move away from XP.

Well, Microsoft may not be around in 5 to 10 years; so that may prompt a software change in itself. Though I do agree, it's going to be hardware pushing some of the changes - namely the 32-bit to 64-bit or even to a 128-bit change. Software has increasingly become less relevant to speed and memory changes as the basic speeds and memory available are more than sufficient for 99% of tasks; with that 1% being the gaming and multimedia editing (yes big markets, but not very big compared to the rest of the entire computing industry).

Yes you can still find supported hardware on the retail level but how much of it is from large OEM outfits that can support an order of 100,000 units? And how long will they continue to offer those options?

Probably for quite a while still. If you can find it in retail, chances are you have a better chance of finding it OEM - especially for things that are less often modified (e.g. USB->Serial converters, etc.) so they have longer life cycles.

What forethought by Microsoft

[ByOhTek]

They used IE6 to E^3 (Embrace, Extetnd, Extinguish) Windows 7 long before it even came out!

Re:What forethought by Microsoft

[clarkn0va]

Parent should be modded insightful, not funny (although this story packs its share of irony). The E^3 strategy was very much behind IE6's idiosyncrasies, and after all these years it has proven quite effective against competing products, including those put forward by Microsoft itself. Where are the defectivebydesign and lockin tags?

Re:What forethought by Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they have been so good at lock-in for users that they locked themselves out...

This is funny...

Re:What forethought by Microsoft

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Please mod clarkn0va's comment up. The real irony is that EEE has proven a barrier to modernization of technology "including those put forward by Microsoft itself". Building an idiosyncratic product on purpose is a gamble with many potential future downsides.

IE Patch

[alphatel]

It's like smoking: If you don't quit, they'll eventually pass laws that force you to.

Re:IE Patch

[FreonTrip]

That, or the filthy habit catches up with you.

Re:IE Patch

[obergfellja]

is that is why I feel so dirty when I am forced to use IE?

Re:IE Patch

[FreonTrip]

It's akin to wading in filth when you haven't had any shots. Paranoia is probably a more appropriate response - on a system with IE6 installed, the only places I visit are Windows Update and Mozilla, to download Firefox. Doing anything else is basically throwing a malware fiesta, and advertising your computer as a buffet..

Re:IE Patch

[martas]

ok, that does it, i'm starting an "americans against discrimination agains smokers" party, or AADAS

Re:IE Patch

[obergfellja]

*Washing Hands vigorously* UNCLEAN!!! UNCLEAN!!!

Re:IE Patch

[somersault]

There aren't going to be any laws that force people to stop smoking. Not while they can make so much money from it. If Microsoft were smart, they would just start charging businesses for continued XP support or something.

Re:IE Patch

[alphatel]

There aren't going to be any laws that force people to stop smoking.

Move to NYC or SF - you can smoke in your house and your car. Most everything else is public property and off-limits.

Re:IE Patch

[FreonTrip]

Don't self-flagellate. Just walk away. It's easier than ever. :)

Re:IE Patch

[drinkypoo]

Move to NYC or SF - you can smoke in your house and your car. Most everything else is public property and off-limits.

That doesn't prohibit smoking, though. Also, you and I both know there's plenty of "underground" venues in NYC and SF, at least some of which must be smokers' havens.

Re:IE Patch

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave the poor smokers alone, they get enough hassle without being compared to IE6.

Re:IE Patch

[somersault]

Sure, here you can't smoke in pubs and clubs etc anymore, but smoking in public is still allowed, and smoking in private definitely is, as long as it's just tobacco. I wish smoking everywhere was illegal, it's very unpleasant to have cigarette smoke being blown your way. If people were smoking cigars or peat that would be fine though, those smell great.

Re:IE Patch

[alphatel]

Sure, here you can't smoke in pubs and clubs etc anymore, but smoking in public is still allowed.

http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2010/oct/14/new-york-city-considers-public-smoking-ban/

Re:IE Patch

[somersault]

I live in Scotland.

I'm happy for them to ban smoking anywhere. If it wasn't dangerous to health then of course they shouldn't ban it. But smokers do not, and should not, have any right to force their smoke onto other people.

Car exhausts aren't great either, but at least they don't smell so bad, and usually aren't right there next to you.

Re:IE Patch

[somersault]

Bleh, I'm always leaving stuff out these days. When I said "anywhere", I meant anywhere in public. They can do what they want in their homes.

The point is that as long as they're still making more money than they're losing from it, the government isn't going to make smoking itself illegal (in private).

Re:IE Patch

[Haeleth]

Move to NYC or SF - you can smoke in your house and your car. Most everything else is public property and off-limits.

Sounds very reasonable to me. It's not about limiting your rights; it's about protecting other people's.

Just as your right to swing your fist stops before it hits my face, so your right to breathe foul-smelling carcinogenic smoke stops before it gets in my eyes or enters my nostrils.

Re:IE Patch

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they will just use the software illegally and pay the fine as a cost of doing business. In the end, it could be far cheaper than a re-write of the app.

Re:IE Patch

[FreonTrip]

I'm within my rights to call the habit which gave my father emphysema a filthy one. Friends of mine smoke, and I don't kick up much of a fuss when they do, but this is a forum where my opinion can be shared.

Re:IE Patch

[martas]

jeeze, chill dude, it was a joke... you act like i'm about to revoke your right to use internet or something...

Re:IE Patch

[FreonTrip]

Caffeine. Friday. Headache. All impair my ability to perceive humor.

Re:IE Patch

[martas]

hm, i wonder if the caffeine has something to do with the headache... you know, nicotine is a stimulant too, so maybe you should quit coffee and take up smoking?

*ducks*

The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[jejones]

Seems appropriate for Halloween.

Re:The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[obergfellja]

IE6 - the undead browser

Re:The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[EraserMouseMan]

It's really about all the un-dead web apps/sites. Blame IE all you want. But it's the devs/companies who wrote the sites, or failed to upgrade them as the world moved on.

Re:The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[ThisIsMyName]

Looks like I just figured out what my Halloween costume is going to be.

Re:The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[jgagnon]

IE6 is the Rage Virus.

Re:The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[Monkeedude1212]

I think we all know that if it were Freddy vs Jason vs IE6 who would win.

IE 6 would make Freddy Facepalm and Jason would commit seppuku from frustration.

Re:The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[wickedskaman]

You have apparently never worked with people who are alive or budgets. Must be nice.

Re:The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[Keeper Of Keys]

The company that failed to upgrade most spectacularly, and basically caused all this mess, was Microsoft itself. IE6 wasn't a bad browser back in 2000. If they'd released an upgraded version every year since, it, its incompatibility and its bugs would be long-forgotten.

Re:The Browser That Wouldn't Die

[Anonymous Coward]

You have apparently never worked with people who are alive or budgets. Must be nice.

Well, actually, I've also never met anyone who was a budget.

So sue them.

[Hatta]

In order to deal with this, companies are looking at virtualizing IE6 only (instead of a full operating system) so that it can run on Windows 7 -- even though Microsoft says this violates licensing agreements.

Then Microsoft should sue them. That would teach them, right? After all, violating intellectual property licenses is the same as theft.

Re:So sue them.

[snowraver1]

I doubt that Microsoft actually would sue them. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

Re:So sue them.

[Anonymous Coward]

whoooosh

Re:So sue them.

[moeluv]

It would be more appropriate if M$ were to create a IE6 vitualization patch that runs in IE8. Small acts of friendliness like that go a long way with customers.

Re:So sue them.

[DarkOx]

Virtualizing it won't do much; good in most cases. I have seen a number of companies deploy a Citrix server or two to their farms to host IE6. That is probably a much better solution than running VM on the desktops around the organization just for IE. It just makes much more sense from a cost and support perspective. The typical corporate desktop is a bit anemic for VMs and supporting the users would just be one more thing to try and tech the helpdesk drones.

Neither virtualizing or Citrix will really work in a lot of situations though. Most of the truly web based, web based applications that had IE6 dependencies probably have been fixed. Its the ones that have that huge mess of custom activeX controls that do all sorts of client side stuff like interact with other applications that are not getting ported because the barriers to doing so are much higher. That won't work in VM unless those other applications and what not are also in the VM for the most part. It will also be really confusing for typical office users to get documents in and out where say the application saves out a report or something.

Finally how the heck to you just virtualize IE6 any way? Its not like IE does not depend on just about all of Windows. The best you could do is a cut down install of 2k or XP with IE as the shell. Maybe than you use Unity or something to make it look like a "local" application. Still its not going to be 100% intuitive.

Re:So sue them.

[pak9rabid]

I doubt that Microsoft actually would sue them. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

Let me guess, you're dressing up as Captain Obvious for Halloween?

Re:So sue them.

[jgagnon]

Make an "IE6 Tab" extension for Firefox...

Err... I mean for IE8.

Re:So sue them.

[ByOhTek]

I have a great code-name for the patch project:

Punctured Condom.

Re:So sue them.

[WeatherGod]

And thus solving the problem forever!

Re:So sue them.

[Hatta]

Finally how the heck to you just virtualize IE6 any way?

Use Wine?

Re:So sue them.

[Hatta]

I went as Captain Obvious one Halloween. No one got it.

Re:So sue them.

[NJRoadfan]

What exactly does the "core" of IE comprise of? Licensing issues aside, I'm sure someone could clobber up a simple shell/run time using IE6 DLLs to render web pages.... or maybe its a good candidate for that WINE port onto Windows.

Re:So sue them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't MS repackage IE6 to be standalone, and then put some restrictions in place that it can only be used to load local intranet sites? This would give people that truly need it for legacy internal apps the ability to use it, but kill it off for general web browsing use.

Re:So sue them.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one got it.

You're Captain Obvious. You're not supposed to sit there and wait till they "get it".

I'm scared

[randomned]

being a web developer, this frightens me.

Re:I'm scared

[Anonymous Coward]

being a web developer, this frightens me.

Have about being a web developer and not an IE developer or flash developer?

Re:I'm scared

[hodet]

Why its mostly enterprise, and a good chunk of users in said enterprises also run Firefox or Chrome. I couldn't care less if a new site does not support IE6. That's that Intranet web browser.

Encapsulating IE6

[mlts]

A while back, I remember thindownload.com offering IE6 in a Thinstall (Now VMWare ThinApp) package. It was taken down, but something like that would be the best thing for places that need IE6, but don't have the hardware to virtualize an ACE VM just for this program. Even better would be running the IE6 package under sandboxie so when (not if) it gets compromised, the damage is very limited what malware could attempt.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[NJRoadfan]

Windows 7 Pro, Enterprise, and Ultimate come with a solution at no extra cost..... its called Windows XP Mode.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[mlts]

Very true. However it isn't as easy to get set up and pushed out on an enterprise basis as a single app file. Another downside is that because XP Mode is complete VM that can easily get compromised, it requires an instance of antivirus for corporate IT reasons. Having a single executable that runs in a "jail" is a lot better performance-wise, and means one doesn't have to set up virtualization on company desktops.

Probably the simplest solution for a company that needs IE6 on desktops for one task or application would be to use Citrix or Terminal server, and just keep a well locked down copy of IE6 on a dedicated server.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

So does OS X it's called VMWare Fusion

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Monkeedude1212]

It's a stopgap measure. These are companies who are already running XP. The problem is that XP support is running out, so virtual XP mode does nothing to mitigate the actual problem. It simply makes the transition to Win7 a bit smoother (sometimes)

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still do this with ThinApp and it's fully supported on Win 7 (by VMware)

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[somersault]

Probably the simplest solution for a company that needs IE6 on desktops for one task or application would be to use Citrix or Terminal server, and just keep a well locked down copy of IE6 on a dedicated server.

But will that work for apps that integrate IE6? I remember one version of our fluid dynamics software that broke when you installed IE7, because parts of it were displayed using the IE rendering engine..

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

This is about what I was thinking. Lots of big businesses have Citrix. It would be fairly easy to keep IE6 running on the server. At least short-term until the web apps are updated.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

Why no one suggests these shitcompanies to update their fucking software???

I would LOVE to know what these IE6-only companies are (so I could avoid their products). I'm quite scared how they handle their other business aspects when they fail this hard even in basics.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

OR, you could have a workstation all setup with XP mode set, with antivirus, etc and image (ghost) it to all future rollouts. Yup...thats how we roll!

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

I read and thought, "That's a very likely scenario." Then I laughed at the thought of people using remote desktop technology just to access a web browser to access a web application.

One of the purposes of a web application is to avoid the need of extra software for users to get to the application.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

However it isn't as easy to get set up and pushed out on an enterprise basis as a single app file.

Yea, MS FTW again. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with BS proprietary software on my servers.

Thank you, community at large!

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Harassed]

All very well when you're sitting at home but have you ever worked in a large corporation? Most PCs aren't powerful enough to run a second virtual OS instance and, even if they could, maintaining, patching and securing a second OS on every PC effectively doubles the admin overhead of the network - not to mention the licensing cost of doubling the number of antivirus seats you have etc. Virtual XP mode is only suitable for home users and for very specific cases in larger organisations. For large-scale rollout another solution is needed. If you want to stick with the virtual XP based solution but have it manageable, Microsoft have MED-V which will happily run an seamlessly instanced IE6 (as virtual XP mode does) but is clever enough to automatically switch between the native IE8 browser and the virtual IE6 browser based on which URLs you are visiting. MED-V still suffers from the increased hardware requirements of running a second virtualized OS on a client PC. Other alternatives are to deploy IE6 using Citrix XenApp running on a Windows 2003-based server but this also suffers from the same issues or VMware have just announced full support for IE6 running under ThinApp which is probably the least-worst option for most organisations if it weren't for the licensing angle.

Microsoft have a huge number of tools and information on performing compatibility testing prior to a Win7 rollout and anyone considering it I would highly recommend looking into the (free) Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT). For more thorough appcompat testing, look at the toolset provided by App-DNA which is fantastic.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[weszz]

They still do. They just came in for a demo and it works great, plus you can fully isolate it, and cheaply (~$10 per client)

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[PRMan]

Microsoft should just offer this appliance for $29/seat or something. They would make a killing.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[mlts]

Last time I checked with them, they were asking $3500 just for a ticket to entry, and a price per seat. Glad they came down in price.

ThinApp is really cool if you have messed around with it. In a locked down environment, it allows an admin to install and update most software (including Microsoft Office) without ever needing admin rights on Windows. All changes (Registry and files) are redirected to a spot in the user's home directory. To boot, updates are as simple as making another encapsulated app and renaming it, then when the old app is executed on a server, the bootstrap piece will grab the new code and run that.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[mlts]

It is ironic, but I have been in locked down environments where this was the best thing to do. One SMB's finance department had their machines completely isolated from the Internet, except for a connection to the core servers, and a terminal server. The terminal server allowed people to browse the Web at their leisure, without having any chances of a Web browser compromise making it to the core machines.

If done right, it is a good security method to consider in some environments.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[oh_my_080980980]

Actually it would be simpler for Microsoft to release a version of IE 6 to run on Windows 7.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[drinking12many]

Exactly everyone keeps forgetting it a full XP VM, your going to need AV and client management suites on it at a minimum which have a cost associated not to mention the extra manpower etc of maintaining the essentially several hundred more PCs. We are probably going a hybrid citrix and software virtualization route as we have found a few web apps that dont seem to want to run even on a virtual ie6 but others that seem to work fine.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[stratdesign]

Windows 7 Pro, Enterprise, and Ultimate come with a solution at no extra cost..... its called Windows XP Mode.

IIRC XP Mode is only available in Enterprise and Ultimate versions.
Also, it is merely a license to download and run VirtualPC within Windows 7, which requires you to provide your own (licensed) copy of XP - for which support runs out in 2014.
No gain over running XP naitively (and VirtualPC is a pig to run)

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[mlts]

Exactly. A VM is a full PC with the headaches. It is enough trouble to manage just the base operating systems, much less a hidden OS that is easily infected. Perhaps one could push out a standard image that dumps its changes when unloaded, but even then, until the image is powered down, there is a compromised box on the corporate network doing damage.

This is why I like encapsulating the app with as little to no client side code installed as possible. Combine ThinApp (which requires no client or infrastructure other than a Samba share and perhaps a machine to talk to to ensure the app hasn't been lifted from the corporate network) with sandboxie's ability to not just shed privs (like DropMyRights), but offer low level protection to either deny access or redirect it somewhere safe.

Perhaps this is something Microsoft should put in on an OS level basis -- the ability to have apps (or even instances of apps so a compromised window won't affect another window doing bank stuff of the same app) redirected completely to their own playpen which is destroyed upon program exit, and the only files saved are the ones the user explicitly saves with a dialog.

By moving virtualization from the system level to the app level [1], it means less overhead (no need to have multiple OSes running even with deduplication technology), and allows for configurability, and even forensic work as malware thinks it is happily scribbling over the Registry and filesystem when in reality, the diffs are there for any white-hat to look at.

[1]: Yes, I am aware that technically applications are virtualized with protected memory, but this going further, isolating not just memory space, but filesystem resources.

Re:Encapsulating IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP Mode would require that all the CPUs in all the end user desktops in a single company have Intel-VT or AMD-V implementations. Windows XP Mode will not run otherwise. Since Windows 7 can easily be run on older hardware or even the company's existing hardware, they're going to attempt to skimp on expenses somewhere and it's probably there unless absolutely needed. I've never walked into a company, big or small, that had the latest and greatest from whatever computer OEM/distributor they got their computers from. The possibility that existing hardware would have Intel-VT or AMD-V implementations on the CPU are very low.

Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[VoiceInTheDesert]

Just goes to show you that no matter how annoying you can claim Microsoft to be, their user base can be equally so with their instance that decade-old software be their ONLY solution.

You gotta upgrade sometime, people.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a rolling distro for myself but do not upgrade windows stuff unless forced. The user base is terrified because of previous experiences? I have for you a windows ntfs backup image that is unusable because somehow installed apps there refer on a cifs share and look for them when trying to deinstall. That share was discontinued. A sane deinstaller would say "warning: i couldn't delete such and such" and go on. Guess what xp does? Abort deinstallation. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[shentino]

IE6 conveniently breaks Web 2.0 stuff like youtube, facebook, and a lot of other stuff that PHBs simply do not want their employees accessing on the job.

It's brokenness is a feature in this case.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Bert64]

This is not entirely the fault of the users, sure they deserve some blame but only for allowing themselves to be suckered by microsoft's lock-in strategies...
It is microsoft that chose to ignore standards and build a browse designed to lock people in.
Had they built a standards compliant browser, then modern browsers being a superset of the standards available at the time would continue to run these old application just fine.
Similarly if these application developers had developed using standard technologies instead of using proprietary microsoft crap this wouldn't be a problem.
You would hope that people would learn from these mistakes, but you see people being suckered in by proprietary crap all the time still, and they will be just as screwed in a few years time.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[gstoddart]

Just goes to show you that no matter how annoying you can claim Microsoft to be, their user base can be equally so with their instance that decade-old software be their ONLY solution.

I don't think you understand the scope of the problem. Not even a little.

Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.

Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary? If so, then I think you have absolutely no understanding of what IT works like on a corporate scale.

I believe the entire Government of Canada has to use IE6 because they have apps that tie them to it. I suspect many really large organizations have this issue as well. It's not like these organizations can just stop using that software that they have.

If Microsoft didn't make stuff that was incompatible with everything else by design, companies wouldn't have this problem. But, as long as Microsoft continues to decide that their way is the best way, companies who have had to work around this are the ones who bear the burden.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[chemicaldave]

I would wager that the majority of the user base still using IE6 is doing so out of ignorance (home users) or are forced to use it (employees). In the latter case, usually some technologically ignorant (and I mean that in a derogatory way) manager is afraid of making the switch to IE7 or *gasp* IE8. Of course some of the blame should be placed on developers who still decide to support IE6, although often times it's that same ignorant manager threatening to stop purchasing software that doesn't conform to their standards that forces developers to use one of the worst pieces of software ever developed in the history computing. But for developers making sites for the public, I have to wonder why some of them support IE6 at all.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[clarkn0va]

You gotta upgrade sometime, people.

My brother is the HVAC chief for one of Canada's larger cities, and he recently purchased Windows 98 on ebay because it is required to run the climate controls in city hall.

Yeah, sooner or later they'll have to upgrade, but if you think IE6 is going to magically vanish tomorrow or even in a couple years when support officially runs out, prepare for a shock.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[orangeyoda]

The Franken-app that I am supporting now, runs only on IE6, 90% of the code could be submitted to DailyWTF. To rewrite it would take 2 - 3 years, to fix it to run in IE8, 2 years or so. Neither is going to happen so it will keep running. The previous developper left because of it, and I can see a future at another company very soon.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Mongoose Disciple]

Have we forgotten that for several years, IE6 was basically the only free-as-in-beer browser that existed, or are we ignoring that sad truth?

You don't have to be crazy to build for what works on a specific browser when it's the only browser there is.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Anonymous Coward]

The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.

The time, money, and effort to initially write it was huge too, except that unlike rewriting it, it was known at the time it was done to be a waste of resources. You're talking about organizations that have already said, "we have money to burn in exchange for getting hardly anything," so what's so radical about the position "we have money to burn in exchange for massive gains"?

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Anonymous Coward]

lolwat? Netscape was free as in beer long before IE 6 was released, and Netscape had started the free-as-in-speech Mozilla project years before IE6 was released (though it didn't have a browser until Netscape 6, released the year before IE6).

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[gstoddart]

The time, money, and effort to initially write it was huge too, except that unlike rewriting it, it was known at the time it was done to be a waste of resources. You're talking about organizations that have already said, "we have money to burn in exchange for getting hardly anything," so what's so radical about the position "we have money to burn in exchange for massive gains"?

Oh, bullshit.

Companies wrote those things because they had an immediate business need to get things done. Over time, they added onto them, and the tools became much more entrenched and something they can't get away from.

No organization said "hey, let's just waste some money and implement something we won't be able to replace". If you think that, you're an idiot who has never worked in the real world.

In the real world, people need solutions now. The reality is, when XP and IE6 were corporate standards, that was the toolset you had to work with.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Mongoose Disciple]

lolwat? Netscape was free as in beer long before IE 6 was released, and Netscape had started the free-as-in-speech Mozilla project years before IE6 was released (though it didn't have a browser until Netscape 6, released the year before IE6).

Sure, there was a Netscape in those days. Just like there was a Matrix Revolutions and a Highlander 2 and a Star Wars Episode 1.

You know, things that were so bad, we pretend they don't exist because they soured your memory of enjoying the previous versions. Except latter-day Netscape wasn't as good as any of those movies.

Developing for Netscape in those days was like fucking a pickle slicer, except painful. Anyone who was in the trenches of web development in that era can tell you, assuming they didn't get PTSD or block out the bad touch entirely.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[MightyMartian]

Even at the worst, there were ways to mitigate the incompatibilities and to make web-apps cross-browser and cross-platform. I call bullshit on everyone blaming users, and even to a certain extent Microsoft (though it does demonstrate how having a near monopoly on the market is very very bad). The real fault is with lazy developers who, rather than using tools available even six or seven years ago to assure some degree of cross-browser compatibility, opted for using IE6 and Windows-specific techniques. Most of these guys knew full well that what they were doing was going to break under other browsers, and they also knew that there were techniques to at least work around incompatibility issues to give some degree of equal behavior for their apps between IE6, Mozilla's offerings and Opera. Google certainly did it, creating an experience that was near identical on the major browsers.

So the real blame here goes to the developers. Microsoft had shifted the landscape enough times in the past for them to know that they couldn't rely on IE6 compatibility forever. But they took the easy path, cutting development time by not doing what they should have done, and they've fucked over a lot of clients who are now faced with a either spending huge amounts of money to bring their web apps up to 2010 standards or trying to find some way to keep IE6 going even as support for it fades away.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[tlhIngan]

Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.

Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary? If so, then I think you have absolutely no understanding of what IT works like on a corporate scale.

I believe the entire Government of Canada has to use IE6 because they have apps that tie them to it. I suspect many really large organizations have this issue as well. It's not like these organizations can just stop using that software that they have.

If Microsoft didn't make stuff that was incompatible with everything else by design, companies wouldn't have this problem. But, as long as Microsoft continues to decide that their way is the best way, companies who have had to work around this are the ones who bear the burden.

It's also why Microsoft spends billions of dollars on backwards compatibility. Microsoft would love to just chuck out the crap on Windows and start afresh. Apple does this - if you don't use published APIs, you'll often find your app breaks in the next OS release. Microsoft would love to do this, but it's too hard.

The vast majority for the backwards compatibility is business - where Microsoft makes their money. Fixing bugs that can break an API is something they have to do carefully because it only has to break one critical application that can keep a company from upgrading, and that can easily be 10,000+ licenses we're talking about.

Some examples
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/06/999999.aspx - 9000 install scripts to install various products for various employees. Now imagine the need to test, verify and fix. And they have source code.

And it's usually the developer's fault (most developers are stupid and do stupid things). In fact, you can count on a lot of developers (for all OSes) to do crap - pass wrong parameters in (that'll break should the function actually check), do horrendous coding practices (polling loops in your battery powered device), etc. And companies have it worse - between contractors and inhouse developers under pressure to "make it work" and "let's make it flexible and overdesign it".

There's a reason thedailywtf.com exists.

Here's another link showing how Microsoft has to patch against developers:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/07/23/4003873.aspx
Sometimes developers lie to the OS:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/11/71307.aspx

Ideally, Microsoft would do something and start fresh. Oh wait, they did. It was called Vista and panned by everyone because things broke.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[afidel]

Dude, you must have *zero* clue about about how a large enterprise works. We put in an ERP package that required IE6 back in 2007, planning for that started in early 2006. We are just now rolling out the next version which supports IE8, but it's been in the works for almost 6 months and won't actually go into production until mid Q1 2011. Because it's mission critical to the business everything has to be thoroughly tested as does everything else that ties into it (we have an automated accounts payable system, 4 different reporting processes, automated document generation with submission to our document management system, automated bill sending, and ties into our CRM system to test). We can't and won't switch out our tested solution just to make some webmonkey at youtube happy. If they want to be able to get the pagehits from our users and all the other corporate users that are in the same situation they'll support IE6 until some majority have made the switch.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[somersault]

What years were those? While Firefox was the first browser to take a real chunk out of IE, there have always been competitors. Netscape Navigator was the main one. It's what we had at University, and trying to develop cool stuff that worked both in IE and Netscape was what put me off web development for so many years.. I didn't want to have to write browser specific software.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[UnknowingFool]

The real fault is with lazy developers who, rather than using tools available even six or seven years ago to assure some degree of cross-browser compatibility, opted for using IE6 and Windows-specific techniques.

That assumes that every developer were in full control of every aspect of development like money and time. I'm sure if developers had all the time and money back then to develop they may have developer cross browser versions. I know for one app I worked on, there were specific directives that it be IE compatible only and not to waste time on other browsers. That with a very aggressive deadline meant I couldn't develop for another browser even if I wanted to. Even then I coded as generically as possible but there some optimizations I had to do for IE but didn't have time to optimize for other browsers or even check to see if they worked. It tested against IE only before release.

Microsoft had shifted the landscape enough times in the past for them to know that they couldn't rely on IE6 compatibility forever. But they took the easy path, cutting development time by not doing what they should have done, and they've fucked over a lot of clients who are now faced with a either spending huge amounts of money to bring their web apps up to 2010 standards or trying to find some way to keep IE6 going even as support for it fades away.

That would require businesses to be extremely focused on IT. Unless the business is in the IT industry, IT does not really get as much focus as the core business whether that be manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, etc. Companies spend only as much time and effort as they need in things other than the core business unless it turns into a crisis like Y2K, etc. So for companies, they could have spent the time and effort mapping out how MS might change their browser over the next five years. Most companies don't really give a shit. They'll deal with changes as they occur.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Anonymous Coward]

The previous developper left because of it, and I can see a future at another company very soon.

Hello, this is your boss. You might want to start looking for that "future" now. Here's a place to get started: www.monster.com
You can pick up your final check on the way out. Have a nice day, and happy Friday!

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Mongoose Disciple]

Basically, there was a couple year gap between Netscape imploding and Firefox rising from the ashes.

The last few versions of Netscape were beyond nightmarish -- you'd have a page that rendered correctly in Netscape 4.3 (I'm pulling version numbers out of the air and they're probably not right, but in concept what I'm saying is correct), wouldn't render at all in Netscape 4.4, rendered great again in Netscape 4.5, and then was completely broken again in Netscape 5.

Compared to that, at the time, IE6 was an oasis of cool, clear water of stability and standards in the desert. That claim seems insane to us 8 or so years later, but there it was.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[blincoln]

Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.

Lots of people have massive amounts of 16-bit apps. Should Microsoft have included 16-bit support in x64 versions of Windows as a result? Lots of people still use VB6 apps. Should Microsoft continue to support Visual Studio 6? When I upgraded to Windows 7, I was annoyed that the one 16-bit app I still used at home wouldn't work anymore, but I got over it.

Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary?

Organizations need to adjust to a world where they can't just build something that works and continue using it as-is indefinitely. That just isn't practical in an environment that also has internet connectivity of some kind. Long-term supportability must include the ability to continue updating the system over time when e.g. the client OS and/or browser are no longer supported by their vendor(s).

Yes, I realize this is painful, and it's a big shift from the world as it was a few decades ago, but that's the tradeoff when internet connectivity is involved. Hopefully it will also make managers realize that meeting a list of feature/behaviour requirements is not enough. The way an application is built is also critical, because obviously it's possible to build something that meets a feature/behaviour requirements list but that will break as soon as any one piece of infrastructure receives a minor update.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[wickedskaman]

lulz aplenty in this post. Mod him up, Scotty!

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies wrote those things because they had an immediate business need to get things done. Over time, they added onto them, and the tools became much more entrenched and something they can't get away from.

Yes. It's called "bad design", or in enterprise terms, "short-term focus". Many of those applications can be linked back to the dot-com bubble, when every kid and their dog was hired instantly to "be part of the hype". And because of the hype maybe, both the people hiring and (most of) the contractors were not expecting the application to last ten years.

But we are now ten years from when the bubble burst. I have zero sympathy for the companies that have eschewed investing in their "business-critical" infrastructure for ten years. It reeks of dodoism.

In the real world, people need solutions now

People that need solutions now have already missed the boat. They make poor businessmen because they lack strategic vision. See, I can do generalized, unfounded and contentless soundbites too ;)

The reality is, when XP and IE6 were corporate standards, that was the toolset you had to work with

Sure. That attitude is fine when you're prototyping, or doing a quick/throw-away/hack job. But when you're designing a "business-critical" application, long-term stability should have been called for. And MS itself had already indicated in 2005 (at the introduction of IE7) that IE7 would only support IE6 as a "compatibility mode" (through META-tags, I believe). That should have been the first clue, even for C?O's, that IE6 was not a suitable toolset (platform) for long-term stability.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Rockoon]

You seem to be conveniently forgetting that leading up to IE's dominance, that Netscape was just as broken as Internet Explorer was in regards to "standards", and that furthermore when Netscape 6 was finally released in 2000, it was HORRIBLE and by just about any measure because it was rushed out the door (even though it was many years late to the game.)

In short, IE6 was the ONLY browser that mattered, and the only real competition was a steaming pile of crap that was even worse.

Take a look at my signature. Thats a direct quote from the Apple God, made at their MacWorld Expo, and this quote was immediately prior to introducing BILL MOTHER-FUCKING GATES LIVE ON VIDEO FEED.

You wonder why IE became the standard? It had everything to do with being objectively better than Netscape.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the cost to upgrade all the software can be prohibitive. That's why there are still lots of ancient (DOS style) inventory management systems.

However, people running legacy systems need to understand what they're getting in to. As time goes on, those systems are going to become more and more expensive to maintain, it will become difficult to buy parts to fix mechanical failures, etc. The choice is not (and has never been) to upgrade or to do nothing. The choice is always to upgrade or support legacy systems. The only thing that frustrates me with this scenario is that people want all the benefits of upgrading, but none of the cost. Make the decision that makes sense, and commit to it!

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[tepples]

IE6 conveniently breaks Web 2.0 stuff like youtube, facebook, and a lot of other stuff that PHBs simply do not want their employees accessing on the job.

But how is it justified when PHBs demand that the same browser be installed on the break room PCs?

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[John Hasler]

> Neither is going to happen so it will keep running.

Not necessarily. It may die with the company (and it may be closely related to the cause of death).

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[tepples]

In short, IE6 was the ONLY browser that mattered, and the only real competition was a steaming pile of crap that was even worse.

As I understand it, this was true for all of a year: from late 2001, when IE 6 came out, to late 2002, when Mozilla Application Suite 1.2 and Netscape 7 landed. How did this one year come to have such an influence?

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Anonymous Coward]

banks can die, but not by shoddy code.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[marcosdumay]

Most "business-critical" apps are promoted prototypes. That happens because people see the prototypes solve their problems now, and don't have ehough time/interest to wait for the fully working software.

And that is the reason most IT depts have to spend almost their entire budget keeping those duct-taped pieces from falling apart, and have no money to finish their prototypes. Thus, closing the circle.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Rockoon]

As I understand it, this was true for all of a year: from late 2001, when IE 6 came out, to late 2002, when Mozilla Application Suite 1.2 and Netscape 7 landed. How did this one year come to have such an influence?

Don't be daft. It was already too late for the corporate world to code for Netscape. The key years were from 1997 to 2000 when Netscape fell hopelessly behind in development, the culmination of this delay was a rushed release in late 200 that put the final nail in its own coffin.

Even the hold-outs switched when Netscape 6.0 hit, and it really wasnt until Netscape 7 (late 2002) that the underlying engine was ready for the public. But at that point Netscape had no marketshare left other than AOL users.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[afidel]

They don't have an enterprise agreement with MS? Under our EA I can download everything back to MS DOS.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[tepples]

I would wager that the majority of the user base still using IE6 is doing so out of ignorance (home users)

How would ignorant home users still have IE 6 on Windows XP? Either they already got IE 8 deployed through Automatic Updates or they are running Windows 98 or Windows 2000.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[NJRoadfan]

Its also handy at loading malware which takes up even more of IT's resources.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[nairnr]

I don't think you understand the scope of the problem. Not even a little.

Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.

Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary? If so, then I think you have absolutely no understanding of what IT works like on a corporate scale.

I believe the entire Government of Canada has to use IE6 because they have apps that tie them to it. I suspect many really large organizations have this issue as well.

The entire Government of Canada has to use IE6 WTF?! I take it you don't work for the Government of Canada, nor do you have a clue. I can't think of many of our corporate systems that span the entire government that require IE let alone IE6. Our standard is now Win7/IE8 but you are free to use the browser of your choice.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[Merk42]

So basically we'll have to wait until April 2014 (or possibly shortly after) when an unpatched vulnerability is found and there's a Y2K like panic?

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[sjames]

Well, what else are they going to do, cry? IE6 is going away and there's nothing they can do about it but adapt or die. They've been on notice for this ever since IE7 came out and wouldn't work with their apps. MS announced EOL for XP years ago. It looks like so far their decision is to die.

When you're standing on train tracks and you see the train coming, do you: a) get off the tracks or b) Say to yourself "it'll probably stop before it gets here"?

If they want apps that can be kept around forever, they should be using Free Software so nobody will grumble about licensing later. That doesn't help the apps they've already made, but

If the 3.5 inch floppies I have it on are still good, I am still free to install SLS Linux on an old machine or in an emulator. I'm also free to take any part of it and re-compile or port it to run on a current version of Linux.

If Microsoft didn't make stuff that was incompatible with everything else by design, companies wouldn't have this problem. But, as long as Microsoft continues to decide that their way is the best way, companies who have had to work around this are the ones who bear the burden.

If companies would quit buying crap from vendors like MS, they wouldn't have these problems.

Re:Never Upgrade, Never Surrender!

[sjames]

There was also Opera (which was not a steaming pile) and it most certainly was possible to write a cross-browser app at the time by sticking to a reasonable subset of functionality that all supported. Such apps still work today on the latest and greatest (they're not any prettier but they DO work). There's no reason they couldn't have built the apps cross-browser and then just used IE6 because they liked that one best. It wasn't even hard to do.

Quirksmode

[tehniobium]

This should be a one-line fix to their existing systems to enable IE8 legacy/quirks mode. Then perhaps a couple of days weeding out the odd bug that pops up.

It really shouldnt be a big upgrade.

Re:Quirksmode

[ifrag]

This should be a one-line fix to their existing systems to enable IE8 legacy/quirks mode.

One line... really? Perhaps you have not noticed how fail the "compatibility mode" in IE8 actually is. If that component actually worked as advertised then maybe it would be simple to get it working but it doesn't. What they have today is far from having a quick fix option.

Re:Quirksmode

[cynyr]

If anything looks different you will need to re-train staff, and if it had some 3rd certification that will need to be re-done if you touch the code.

Re:Quirksmode

[MudflapSoftware]

This is absolutely correct. There are meta elements you can add to the html payload which will force IE8 to run with specific rendering rules. However, the *rendering* of the content isn't the biggest problem.... A *LOT* of internal applications were written without sandboxing and security in mind. So, in the early days of javascript/dhtml, it was the wild wild west, and bad code simply will not work. The security semantics of iframes also changed along the way. ... and then there is the white elephant in the room.... ActiveX/OCX's in the browser ... which enabled vb6 developers to get 'fat client' functionality running in a browser. In this case, many of the legacy control toolkits are marginally functional on Windows7. The bottom line is that IE6, VB6 and IIS made it VERY easy for devs to develop solutions *quickly* for the enterprise. Now, they are reaping the harvest of bad security decisions, bad coding, etc...

Re:Quirksmode

[Mongoose Disciple]

For what it's worth, IE8 in compatability mode has worked perfectly with the not-small amount of legacy IE6 apps I've encountered since across three or four unrelated clients.

I'm not sure what features you're using that it doesn't support the same way, but for a lot of companies it really will be a quick fix.

Re:Quirksmode

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you have not noticed how fail the "compatibility mode" in IE8 actually is.

how much of a failure

English, mother fucker, do you speak it?

Re:Quirksmode

[Beerdood]

Also, should be noted that compatibility mode is only compatible for IE 7, not IE 6. What works in IE 7 may not necessarily work in IE 6.

XP Mode?

[dilbert627]

Isn't that the point of XP Mode? To run legacy applications that aren't 7-compatible?

Re:XP Mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then they would only be using Win7 to run XP Mode 24x7, which defeats the whole purpose of upgrading. Until they update their web applications to run on a modern browser, they're stuck using IE6 on XP.

Re:XP Mode?

[frozentier]

Unless you are running a premium version of Win7 (not the standard version that ships with most computers), XP mode is disabled.

Re:XP Mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point of the compatibility view lists feature in IE7/IE8. You can still use the IE6 rendering engine if you put your own site into the Compatiblity View List for your machines. This has worked for my crappy old apps at least.

Re:XP Mode?

[VGPowerlord]

Unless you are running a premium version of Win7 (not the standard version that ships with most computers), XP mode is disabled.

You are aware that we're not referring to home users here?

Keeping in mind that we're talking about upgrading to Win7, I would think businesses, even small ones, would have Win7 Professional. Larger businesses would have Win7 Enterprise (which is volume-licensed).

Re:XP Mode?

[morcego]

I still find it interesting they call it a "mode", instead of what it is: a complete Windows XP virtual machine, and runs separated from the Windows 7 system (as much as a guest and host systems can be separated).

Isn't marketing-speak great ?

Re:XP Mode?

[Tim C]

Business PCs come with Windows 7 Business or Ultimate, so this is not a consideration.

(I would also dispute "most", given how many PCs the corporates get through)

Re:XP Mode?

[somersault]

Then they would only be using Win7 to run XP Mode 24x7, which defeats the whole purpose of upgrading.

As far as I can tell, the "whole purpose of upgrading" for 99% of users is simply because the upgrade is there. They want new and shiny. This is how people think. This is why we keep getting new versions of Microsoft Office and EA Sports games every year or two.

Re:XP Mode?

[geekoid]

uh, no. There a many benefits to upgrading. Everything from vendor support, to utilizing 64 bit power.

Also, XP is out of support.

Re:XP Mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

a complete Windows XP virtual machine, and runs separated from the Windows 7 system

That's not true. XP mode allows VM applications to draw on the host's desktop, so they can act as first-class citizens. There is also integration between the host and client Start Menu's, so you can actually start XP Mode applications without starting the VM first.

Of course, if you manually start the XP VM, then you lose those benefits: you get two desktops (the client is windowed), two start menu's and VM apps can not leave the client window. But it's still more than "just a VM".

Re:XP Mode?

[somersault]

There is of course a 64 bit version of XP too though.

Being out of support isn't great, but since you actually have to pay to upgrade XP, if I were still using Windows I'd not upgrade until I was getting a new machine anyway. I was happily using Windows 98 up until 2004 or so. I only upgraded because Lego Star Wars required XP :/

Re:XP Mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is any business NOT using a Professional version that is sold on all major retailers Business class models? You can't even buy a home version OS on most of Dell/HP's business lines of computers.

Re:XP Mode?

[TheQuantumShift]

Right, but it requires a full XP license which these companies don't want to pay for. They're talking about virtualizing IE 6 only, nothing else. This means no extra license revenue for MS. I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup start hawking some patchwork IE running in WINE running under cygwin running on Windows 7 concoction... Hmmm.... /me runs for the nearest patent office.

IE6 on WIndows 7

[greap]

I use http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE for cross browser testing and IE6 runs fine on Win7. Also you can install IE6 for XP mode with a couple of hacks.

Dependent Programs

[rakuen]

There's a lot of dependent programs out there. In addition to organizations running older versions of Internet Explorer, there are also those running earlier versions of Java and other constructs which have changed over time. I know some of this is happenstance, you can't force a language to continue supporting everything you put into your program. But some of this is people putting in deprecated objects and functions. Why would you do that? Maybe it'll be faster, but they've already warned you that, "Hey, this probably won't be here in the near future!" Doing it another way isn't going to be better for you now, but it'll keep you from being completely locked in later.

Seems like an opportunity

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

...for some other browser maker to work with these companies to create a compatibility module that would let them use a NEW browser with their old applications. If Mozilla wasn't so busy on Firefox 4.0, they could probably get something coded up to help these companies put IE6 where it belongs (trash bin).

Has anyone from these companies tried running XP in a VM to maintain compatibility, while giving them an avenue to load a new OS, and start rolling out new applications? It would seem like the smoothest way to get over this problem.

Re:Seems like an opportunity

[colin_young]

Assuming it's even possible, that's just going to encourage people to continue to to use and rely on the IE specific features. We're talking about stuff like ActiveX, behaviors and IE "quirks". Please, don't let any of that stuff infect other browsers.

Re:Seems like an opportunity

[reaper]

Actually, Windows 7 has Windows XP available as an option. It runs XP apps in a VM and displays the window as a native window on the 7 desktop. You would need to tweak the default install to get IE 6 on there (it ships with 8), but it's still cheaper over the long haul than not upgrading to windows 7.

Re:Seems like an opportunity

[gstoddart]

Has anyone from these companies tried running XP in a VM to maintain compatibility

Did you even make it through the summary?

In order to deal with this, companies are looking at virtualizing IE6 only (instead of a full operating system) so that it can run on Windows 7 — even though Microsoft says this violates licensing agreements.

Yes, they have looked at it. As usual, Microsoft are being asshats. Heck, I think Microsoft even claims you can't run their operating systems on virtual machines unless it's their version of it.

Re:Seems like an opportunity

[clarkn0va]

...a compatibility module that would let them use a NEW browser with their old applications...It would seem like the smoothest way to get over this problem.

As long as IE6 and Winxp are still in support, how is your suggestion smoother than just cruising along with status quo?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not condoning the choice, but it's not hard to see why some people and organisations are reluctant to get on the treadmill.

Re:Seems like an opportunity

[StuartHankins]

So long as IE6 apps require ActiveX (some do, some don't), this will prevent Firefox from ever working with those apps. Firefox made the decision long ago (a very good decision IMHO) to exclude ActiveX.

Re:Seems like an opportunity

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

How is this smoother?

If I can run Win7 (or another current OS of my company's choosing), I get the new browser on my system. This allows the folks who wrote the browser-based app to update it so it runs natively on my new platform. For those apps that aren't migrated, I can run XP in a VM and access it through IE6.

If all the workstations are running XP, what incentive is there to update that app? If they update the app, then migrate all the desktops, what happens when something goes wrong? Using the old OS in a VM is a great way to ease into a migration.

I keep XP on a VM on my personal system for those times when I need to run an app that doesn't work on my current OS. I don't think I've used it in a couple of weeks, but it's nice to know it's there (along with a Vista VM - for laughs, and even a couple of OS/2 VMs).

Re:Seems like an opportunity

[clarkn0va]

How is this smoother?

Sitting on a years-old OS and browser that finally mostly works the way we expect it to vs:

• running Win7 (or another current OS of my company's choosing)

Changing OS: more work and money. Point: IE6

• get the new browser on my system.

Changing browsers: more work. Point: IE6

• the folks who wrote the browser-based app update it so it runs natively on my new platform.

Rewriting the app: more work and money. Point: IE6

• for those apps that aren't migrated, run XP in a VM and access it through IE6.

Setting up and maintaining a vm: more work and money. Point: IE6

If all the workstations are running XP, what incentive is there to update that app?

If running a new OS is your only reason to update your internal app, then why would you bother to do either?

No matter how much Winxp or IE6 suck, some organisations are comfortable with it, so what else is there?

Re:Seems like an opportunity

[BlackSnake112]

If you are talking about XP mode, that is a VM and the XP it installs has IE6 not 8. Granted it is free for the pro, ultimate, and enterprise version. Not available on the other versions. You need to have hardware big enough to run the VM and the host OS at the same time.

Let that be a lesson

[C_Kode]

Let that be a lesson to all those idiots who wrote IE only web applications.

Brilliant!

Re:Let that be a lesson

[icebraining]

They've already been paid are move on. Their clients are the suckers who got bitten, not the people who wrote the apps.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[Mongoose Disciple]

Let that be a lesson to all those idiots who wrote IE only web applications

Really. And which other free-as-in-beer browser should they have been writing for in, say, 2002?

You kids who can't remember the dark days of there being only one web browser need to get off my lawn.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Let that be a lesson to all those idiots who wrote IE only web applications.

Brilliant!

Actually, I would say thank you to those people.

The need for IE6 is keeping people away from vista/win7 with their annoying (re)activation, insidious DRM and craptacular user interface.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[Tim C]

Yeah, they must be kicking themselves for having already been paid once, and possibly having been paid again to port their apps over to IE7+...

Re:Let that be a lesson

[0123456]

You kids who can't remember the dark days of there being only one web browser need to get off my lawn.

What days were they? 1993?

Even then I'm pretty sure that there were browsers available other than Mosaic.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[PraiseBob]

I've been coding web pages since Mosiac in 93. After seeing the browser wars, it was WELL ESTABLISHED by 2002, that cross-browser compatibility was an important feature. Anyone coding for IE6 would be familiar with the pain of making it work in IE4 and 5. How much brain does it take to realize that IE7/8/9/10 will someday come out?

Re:Let that be a lesson

[Mongoose Disciple]

After seeing the browser wars, it was WELL ESTABLISHED by 2002, that cross-browser compatibility was an important feature.

It was, and then the browser wars were over and there was only one browser.

Find me a project manager who wanted to spend time and money on cross-browser compatability in 2002, and I'll find you a project manager who probably lost his job over increasing the budget of the project by around 50% for no good reason.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

blowing my mod points but :
Their clients are often the idiots who forced them to make sure everything worked nicely in IE6 once better solutions were around, and who, when told it would probably break in other browsers, answered "we don't care."

Don't blame the messenger. Most devs would have been *HAPPY* not to have to write for IE6 once they had alternatives.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[blincoln]

Yeah, they must be kicking themselves for having already been paid once, and possibly having been paid again to port their apps over to IE7+...

If you wrote an app in such a bad way that it will only work on a very specific version of IE, would you really want to go back and work with that code, even if you were getting paid?

Re:Let that be a lesson

[tropicdog]

Amen, it reminds me of a little saying, "There's nothing as permanent as a temporary solution."

Re:Let that be a lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they must be kicking themselves for having already been paid once, and possibly having been paid again to port their apps over to IE7+...

Because all IT departments farm out development for applications such as this to out-of-house developers?

Hardly.

I work for a small regional retailer and our own developers work with Apache and Tomcat. Though we actually take the time to ensure that our applications will run on newer versions of I.E.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[CyprusBlue113]

And the point everyone else is making, is that those upper managers made their bed, and now they can lie in it. There was plenty of oppertunity to require standard compliant code in all their purchasing, they chose not to.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[Mongoose Disciple]

Out of curiousity, what kind of work do you do wherein it's considered acceptable to massively bloat your budget to include a feature that, at that time, is and is expected to remain completely useless?

And, really, what other browser would you have made sure the app in question also worked in? Netscape? Which version? At that point in time you would have doubled to tripled the budget of most of these kinds of projects just to get it to run in the massively non-consistent last three years versions of Netscape alone.

There is not now nor ever has been a completely standards-compliant browser, and cross browser development, while it has gotten cheaper and easier, was neither in 2002 for any non-trivial web app.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

And which other free-as-in-beer browser should they have been writing for in, say, 2002?

Netscape or Mozilla.

Next question?

Re:Let that be a lesson

[joost]

Might be true, but I guarantee those developers will be in pain, hating their jobs. Meanwhile the standards-based crowd is working on useful apps, serving satisfied customers. I know which camp I'd want to be in...

Re:Let that be a lesson

[bunratty]

Well, how are you going to get job security doing that? I suppose you make sure you fully document and comment your code, too. Expect to be replaced with fresh-out-of-college kids or an offshore development team!

Re:Let that be a lesson

[PraiseBob]

You get what you pay for. IE 4 was released in 1997. IE 5 was released in 1999. IE 6 was released in 2001. In 2002, if you are a project manager, and have dealt with all of the compatibility issues between those three browsers alone, you must surely be concerned that in 2003, a new browser could make your project obsolete.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[icebraining]

Are you kidding? XP once forced me to lose all my files and reinstall because "the hardware had changed" (it hadn't) and my key stopped being recognized.

With Windows 7 you can use it for months even with missing activation info.

Re:Let that be a lesson

[icebraining]

Clearly they should use BobX.

Serves them Right

[segedunum]

I have no sympathy for these organisations. When you create web applications that are designed for one web browser then you're going to get burned. Maybe they will eventually learn that Microsoft lost the API war, but I doubt it:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Re:Serves them Right

[shentino]

I think organizations rather like having a browser that screws up social networking.

Re:Serves them Right

[Mongoose Disciple]

Of course, that article is also 6 years old and said that Linux was about to overwhelm Windows on the desktop.

I wouldn't really point to it as a source of prescience.

Re:Serves them Right

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it. It would be much more reliable to actual block those networks than to hope they won't work.

That argument sounds like a management cop-out, i.e. have a fancy bullet point that you can sell to your evil overlord, so you don't look so bad for being incompetent at software development/being stuck with your predecessors fuck-ups who by now probably is your higher-up.

Re:Serves them Right

[sydneyfong]

When you create web applications that are designed for one closed web browser then you're going to get burned.

If you coded for Firefox 1.0 only, relying on specific quirks and bugs of Firefox 1.0, at least you know there's still some way to somehow continue use it for another ten years. Mozilla isn't going to come out and say you can't run it under a VM.

Re:Serves them Right

[segedunum]

It doesn't say any such thing, but then reading is beyond most around here................

IE6: bigger mess than Y2K

[CAIMLAS]

IE6 is beginning to be a bigger mess than Y2K. It's not yet such a long-term problem, but the scope is pretty board due to the fact that it's the entire program, not just date fields, which are broken.

Re:IE6: bigger mess than Y2K

[StuartHankins]

+1 Insightful. Wish I hadn't spent all my mod points yesterday.

Not just IE specific apps

[weicco]

A lot of applications are developed against directions in MSDN. For instance a lot of apps write stuff under %ProgramFiles% or replaces DLLs under %SystemRoot%. This means that they don't work well (read: at all) in Vista or 7 without administrator rights. As a member of our IT staff I'm really reluctant to give administrator password or administrator rights to, well, anyone. That's why we've been sticking to XP.

In fact, I can't think a single ActiveX component that's holding us back. In fact we just upgraded IE6 to IE8 on all our machines. Some internal website didn't look so good in IE8 but that was easy to fix. Personally I've been running Windows 7 and IE9 beta for couple of months now.

Re:Not just IE specific apps

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't give admin access to anyone, how do apps that write to %ProgramFiles% work on XP? Surely they'd work better on Vista and Win7 which have file system redirection to handle this kind of problem?

Re:Not just IE specific apps

[weicco]

That is a good question. Currently we've had to give admin accesses to people on some machines. I wasn't in the house when this decision was made and I don't know history about it. In the future, with Windows 7, this is sure going to change.

Re:Not just IE specific apps

[shutdown -p now]

Merely writing stuff under %ProgramFiles% shouldn't be a problem, actually, since it'll get virtualized automatically (have a look at ~\AppData\Local\VirtualStore some time). I've got a bunch of old games which do that (for savegames and settings), and virtualization does kick in for them.

Re:Not just IE specific apps

[Lonewolf666]

I had some fun with this topic a while ago, so I can comment at length...

In XP, non-admins may per default write to %ProgramFiles%, but the permissions on the files are set to give only that user (and the administrators) write access. This has the following practical consequences:
-A non-admin user can usually install an application and use it by himself without problems.
-A non-admin user cannot modify or delete applications installed by another user.
-If the application writes to %ProgramFiles% during everyday operation, this will work only for the user who installed it (and admins of course).

On Vista and Win7 every user gets his own, private copy in his "virtual store" in the user profile. So it should work for each user separately, but collaboration features that rely on exchanging data through files under %ProgramFiles% are likely to fail.

There are also interesting side effects Microsoft probably has not intended. One I have observed myself:
-Install program, do some work with it
-Uninstall program and manually remove remaining data from %ProgramFiles%, to get a clean slate for further testing
-Reinstall program, do some tests
-Wonder why the old settings from the first installation are still there ;-)
Solution: Uninstalling a program does not remove the redirected private copy of the .ini file that is located in %InstallationDirectory%. After reinstalling and starting the program, access is redirected to the private copy instead of the newly installed "virgin" configuration. You need to manually delete the redirected private copy...

IE6 needs something like Mozilla Prism

[smartr]

I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just make something like Mozilla Prism that runs IE6 or whatever flavor of IE that you need to run their browser-dependent applications. If users need these internal apps they keep running them in a sort of sandbox, while not making life hell for everyone by surfing the web on IE6. I'm sure most MS Administrators would breath easier knowing their users can still run the corporate applications while not running a vulnerable browser all over the web...

Nobody Blame Microsoft. Seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

The short-sighted software developers who ever wrote anything that ran exclusively on IE 6 are to blame. You cannot blame the gun maker for the murder. It has been clear for half the decade that web technologies were moving beyond the stagnating IE 6. Still, so many web applications have since been tailored to it, with complete disregard for standards and ignorance to tools (e.g., cross-browser JavaScript libraries) that allow easy migration elsewhere. Now those who tied themselves to the platform will rightfully feel the pain, either in being saddled with antiques or the costs to develop what they should have developed in the first place.

Re:Nobody Blame Microsoft. Seriously.

[cynyr]

You are assuming that all this software was written by "developers"... As an mechanical engineer i have written things using vba and autolisp that are likely now totally depended on. A lot of this sort of stuff is written adhoc with no guidelines but simply to automate something. Hell, a former company had a terminal based turbopascal (maybe) app that no one knew how it worked. i was told "I think we did some tests a while ago, and made a set of data points and fitted a function to those curves, and we use that function now", but of course nobody remembers what it is, and the people that wrote it had moved on as well.

I'm no anonymous coward...

[Antony-Kyre]

I love IE6! I love the feel of it, where the buttons and everything are. I love the way it acts when I go to websites.

I detest IE8. The only thing IE8 has going for it would be the ability to drag and drop sites into the toolbar. But everything else, I don't like.

Re:I'm no anonymous coward...

[LingNoi]

Dude you should join my IE6 supporters group. It's a community that's pressuring Microsoft to continue support for IE6.

Re:I'm no anonymous coward...

[kenrblan]

You may love IE6, as it is your right. Web Developers, on the other hand, absolutely detest you. When building a website on standards compliant HTML and CSS, you create a beautiful and functioning site and test against everything except IE6 until it is right. Then you spend four times the initial development time hacking away on specific fixes for IE6.

Who's fault is it?

[LordNimon]

I wonder if the Microsoft employees who made the decision to make IE6 incompatible with HTML standards have been disciplined in any way for the money that they're costing Microsoft now?

Re:Who's fault is it?

[rakuen]

Whose fault, whose fault?
It's San Andreas' Fault!
'Cause Mister Richter
Can't predict her
Kicking our asphalt!

To be a bit more serious though, it probably didn't even come up. At the time, I imagine Microsoft was thinking, "We want our browser to do this." So they did it, even if it broke the standards. Of course, a few years down the line that mentality became a problem.

Re:Who's fault is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be nice if it was all such an innocent accident? Unfortunately it was found in the anti-trust trial that it was a deliberate Microsoft strategy to break standards in order to lock in their customers to Internet Explorer. The strategy was known as "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" at Microsoft. This is one instance where Microsoft-bashing has a well-documented justification.

Short sightedness

[jshriver]

Perhaps they should have written the code in a portable way rather than require IE6. Who still does that? It was bound to be obsolete eventually. Guess it's time for them to pay out for vm software for old XP or pony up the money to make the software correctly. Willing to be Active X is involved.

Re-develope

[Murdoch5]

If you have a web browser app it's time to reprogram it and have it work on better more robust browsers. Back in the day IE was decent but now it's one of the worst browsers on the market. I understand that money is tied up with these old application but how long do you want to sit there on IE6 and stop any chance of updating.

More so then reprogramming web apps to run on new IE versions, why not reprogram the web apps so it runs on any browser, this will prevent future update issues. Web development is very similar to desktop programming, the best way to make the app in the first place is to start fresh and make it 100% compatible with all platforms or in the this case all browsers.

Spend the money once and make a great cross browser program and never look back. Nothing will be gained by waiting for IE6 to be ported up to Windows 7, the problem is that the programs aren't really made right in the first place, if they were IE6 would not be the only issue.

Re:Re-develope

[cynyr]

I understand that money is tied up with these old application but how long do you want to sit there on IE6 and stop any chance of updating.

2014, when XP is no longer supported.

Re:Re-develope

[Gadget27]

I think in most cases it's not even a matter of having to reprogram the entire web application. The backend should need no updating (even though it may be preferable in some cases). I'd bet the majority of the issues are simply X will render in IE6 as designed, but nowhere else. And thats no big surprise. It's also not a big deal to fix. I cant be the only one here who thinks there's a world of difference between updating a frontend and redeveloping an entire web app. The former should take a small fraction of time/resources versus an entire rebuild, and in both cases the end result would be the same for the user. It sounds like there's a nice new emerging market for any of us who wish to play cleanup and make a few dollars for some easy work in the meantime.

Standalone IE6

[Barefoot Monkey]

I personally believe that if Microsoft were to release an official, properly working standalone edition of IE6 then people wouldn't have reason to cling to the old version just because they need it for a particular case. They could even brand it as "Microsoft Intranet Viewer" or something.

Huge Success!

[Pentium100]

Well, Microsoft made IE6 not compatible with standards so that people would make sites compatible with IE (because the majority use IE, since it came with Windows) so that the sites would be less compatible with standard browsers that work on other operating systems, so that people would use Windows and IE, since a lot of sites only worked with IE.

Corporate software also requires IE6, since it comes with Windows XP, why make a program that's compatible with other browsers, except IE and then require that browser when all your users have IE6 by default? Now it is inconvenient, but redoing the app to support standards would be expensive.

So, now IE6 is so entrenched in the corporate environment that not only it prevents the company from migrating to Linux or some other OS, but it also prevents the company from migrating to a newer OS made by Microsoft.

Whoever was in charge of the decision to make IE6 non compatible did a wonderful job - XP and IE6 will live for a long time. It will probably even outlive newer versions of Windows.

Re:Huge Success!

[Cederic]

Exactly. IE6 is fantastic, truly magnificent - it's a poster child for any architect.

Why? Because now we have the perfect "here's how to fuck up your organisation by not following standards" example. With the added bonus that almost any organisation I go to work for will have fallen into exactly that trap.

Re:Huge Success!

[RivenAleem]

Whoever was in charge of the decision to make IE6 non compatible did a wonderful job - XP and IE6 will live for a long time. It will probably even outlive newer versions of Windows.

Well, it clearly has. Where is Vista in the corporate market? And there will be another windows, perhaps even 2 before they stop supporting XP in 2014. And just because they stop giving support, doesn't mean that companies everywhere will instantly drop it. It will continue to be used for another few years. Something's gotta give.

Re:Huge Success!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think MS should be sued for terrorism: purposeful sabotage of administrative infrastructures for their own gain.

Re:Huge Success!

[gstrickler]

Correct. The lesson to be learned is this: "don't design software or business processes around a single vendor/product solution." When you have a good software architect, you can take advantage of vendor specific advantages and technologies without getting tied to a specific vendor/product/version.

Here's an example of getting benefit from a single vendor's advantages without tying yourself to that vendor: Starting in 1989, I designed and wrote a high performance, multi-user app, part of which was an OLTP system that ran 24/7 for 19+ years. I designed and implemented it as a DOS app on a Novell Netware 3.x network, but there was nothing about the design or implementation that required Netware. Over the years, we tested it with various Windows servers and Linux running Samba, and it worked there also. We kept it on Netware for the entire time because it was significantly faster than on a Windows network with Linux/Samba performance in-between those two, and because the Netware server was very stable. We were never locked in to Netware, but we did get to take advantage of the performance and stability benefits. We did upgrade to Netware 4.2, and most user workstations were upgraded to Win 3.11, Win95, WinNT4, Win2k, or WinXP over the years. Some of the user interaction portions were replaced with Windows apps to provide more flexibility, but they were also independent of the network/server. And, we had the benefits of Novell's NDS for years before (and after) MS created AD

MS made several errors with IE6: making it non-standard, integrating it into the OS, and encouraging people to write apps for it using ActiveX. All of which were intended to lock the customer into Windows. If it weren't for trying to integrate it into the OS, MS could simply let enterprises install it on a newer version of Windows. They would still have the slow IE6 engine with all it's security issues, but for an in-house app, that's manageable. Instead, they're trapped on XP until they rewrite/replace those IE6 specific apps, so MS has to continue to support XP and IE6, while the enterprises are not upgrading to Win7. Poor choices, bad design. All due a few completely predictable and preventable failures of software design by both MS and the enterprises who created critical processes tied to IE6 and ActiveX.

Re:Huge Success!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which standards were better than Internet Explorer 6 in 2001? Designing applications that worked with the approved standards then was possible but the application would do very little. Developers were left with choice of IE6 and getting things done, using Netscape's exclusive extensions once Netscape managed to stabilize the code, hoping Opera would design for business work not for some theory of the web, using Java to do all the work with its own set of problems, or waiting until W3C actually approves a standard that makes effective development easy. W3C spent 9 years on CSS 2 and it still isn't a finalized standard. No developer can possibly hold out for the standards organizations to make their sloth like negotiating.

Karma is a bitch!

[whoever57]

MS created a deliberately non-standard browser and now suffers the consequences.

Re:Karma is a bitch!

[gstoddart]

MS created a deliberately non-standard browser and now suffers the consequences.

Sadly, it's their enterprise customers which will suffer the consequences.

Let that be a lesson to Microsoft

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Don't write crappy software that locks people in and prevents them from upgrading.

New sales pitch needed

[RivenAleem]

I work on IE6 all day long. All our in-house apps were made for it. They ALL use Java.

Recently one of the apps was upgraded and it has caused havok all this week as the java platform is not running properly and it's pretty much borked six ways from sunday.

While trying to do some critical work yesterday, stuff that just had to be done as deadline was coming up, I tried, on a hunch to see if it ran in chrome or FF. I got a popup to tell me that my browser did not meet the requirements to run the app. I ignore it and continued on my way, hopeful that it would work in some small way. To my surprise, much of it did work. Not only that, but in chrome it worked bloody quick, like 20-30 seconds to do a task that usually took 3-4 minutes.

There were some thing it flat out REFUSED to do, but I was, ultimately, able to do my job and meet the deadline.

So the question is. With so many of these apps that run using java, and run so much faster on chrome than IE6, why has nobody managed to convince upper management that there would be a huge productivity boost if they invested in converting the apps to run on the newer browsers?

Who do I have to email to try to convince them of this?

(I work for a major multinational company, who uses these apps all over the world, all day long. I would estimate an increase in efficiency of at least 30% if the apps were converted to work in new browser)

Disclaimer: I'm not so computer savvy, my areas of expertise are in chemistry. I know that java and javascript are 2 totally different things, so a browser that's great a javascript doesn't automatically make it great at java. The increased speed of chrome and FF are not likely to be because of their javascript engines, in reality, I don't know why they should be that much faster, it just turns out like that from my observation.

Re:New sales pitch needed

[StuartHankins]

In a "major multinational company", you probably can't get to the people whose minds need this extra info. You will likely be competing with the consultants and software vendors who buy them fishing and golf trips. And the one CXO who likes certain software manufacturers or products because his kid told him they were great.

<sigh> I wish logic were easier to grasp for some people in corporate environments, but often politics come into play.

Re:New sales pitch needed

[Dr_Barnowl]

We observed that IE6 would really bog down actual native code - to whit, ActiveX controls.

Sick of the horrible sloth of our ActiveX application, for testing purposes I wrote a VB container application for it. It immediately cut all operation times in half.

Disclaimer : Yes, ActiveX is evil. This was quite some time ago.

Rejoice!

[Anonymous Coward]

We get to say "I told you so".

XP Mode Anyone?

[klwood911]

Its called XP Mode, microsoft ships it with IE6 installed and can be legally run on any Windows 7 Professional PC. Just download and install for free. When the sites are upgraded, swap back over to IE8 and uninstall. Plus it has the added benefit of running all your old software that won't run under 7.

Let this be a lesson

[Matt Perry]

Let this be a lesson to those companies who said it was too expensive to follow web standards when developing web sites and applications.

Re:Let this be a lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Let this be a lesson to those companies who said it was too expensive to follow web standards when developing web sites and applications.

Yeah! If we just ignored this entire mess and let Microsoft decide our standards like they should (same thing they did when they invented the computer), we wouldn't have any problems at all!

Oh, sorry, what audience were you talking to, us or the PHBs who decided to doggedly stick with IE6?

Re:Let this be a lesson

[Matt Perry]

I don't understand what you are talking about, probably because you don't understand what I am talking about. Web developers with a clue and a desire for future compatibility have said for years how important it is to follow web standards and avoid writing code specific to a single browser. Many other developers and PHBs ignored this advice and targeted a single browser (IE6). Now they are paying the price, literally, because it's costing them time and money to either fix their code or engineer and maintain a workaround.

The situation reminds me of the quote: "There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over."

Xp mode is still running a full XP + VM overhead

[Joe The Dragon]

Xp mode is still running a full XP + VM overhead.

So you still have the 2014 deadline and may have to run AV and other stuff in the VP and the host OS.

The Lesson

[assertation]

If Microsoft had take W3 standards seriously sooner, they wouldn't be losing potential sales on Windows 7 now.

The companies that built software targeted only at IE 6 are also reaping what they are sowing. For years many web designers and tech managers have been ignorant of the existence of W3 standards. I have seen many instances where upon being told that the internet and IE are not same thing these people brushed that piece of information off.

At the time when IE 6 was the most advanced IE, if you wanted to increase the chances of your web app working everywhere you would develop it using a standards compliant browser like Firefox and then test it in IE 6, adjusting your code if necessary to get it working in both.

Too many programmers viewed this inconvenience as a pain in the ass and convinced managers in meetings to not mandate this practice.

I guess it comes down to pay now or pay later.

They didn't want to pay then as they were building things, so they have to pay now unless their users don't mind using a very old browser.

Too bad so sad.

[wazzzup]

At what point don't they just buckle down and rewrite the apps to use standards-based methods? They put their money on a losing horse. Suck it up and move on.

I understand that Microsoft encouraged folks to write their apps with Active X and all that but they learned a valuable lesson - don't trust mission-critical operations to a single-vendor solution.

Yes, I know Exchange and Active Directory ft into this category as well but the only difference is that Microsoft hasn't dropped support for them. I mean, why is going 100% Microsoft a rational decision but if your CIO said "We're going 100% Apple." he'd be fired in a heartbeat?

There are many large companies and governments that seem to make things work without Microsoft technologies and I'm sure you can too.

This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[linebackn]

I would like to once again take this opportunity to say "I told you so" to all of the idiots who wanted IE "integrated" in to the OS. If IE was a normal application, like every other browser, then you would be able to run IE 6 on Windows 7 along side IE 8 in a fully supported manner without any fancy hacks or virtualization.

People would have been better off sticking with web stuff that only worked in Netscape 4. I'd need to double check, but I am pretty sure Netscape 4.8 will run fine under Windows 7.

But, of course, when Windows 9 comes out, people will still be stuck on Windows 7 and IE 8.

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you Captain Hindsight!

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[Sprouticus]

Noone outside of MS wanted IE integrated into the OS. It was done as slight of hand to give MS a reason why they could not simply make IE a download as part of anti trust legislation.

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[Tim C]

If IE was a normal application, like every other browser, then you would be able to run IE 6 on Windows 7 along side IE 8 in a fully supported manner without any fancy hacks or virtualization.

Prove that the problem isn't due to the IE6 installer (can you even download it (legally) any more?) doesn't expect certain specific versions of Windows and refuse to run if the version string doesn't match.

But, of course, when Windows 9 comes out, people will still be stuck on Windows 7 and IE 8.

I'm running IE9 beta on my Windows 7 machine at home.

To be fair, I agree with the central point of your argument (code to standards, don't force upgrade unnecessarily) but your arguments don't hold water.

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[swamp boy]

Well said!

Additionally, most of these companies may have been better off writing their apps in VB or whatever other client/server (pre-web) development tool. At least they would likely be able to move to Windows 7 with more ease.

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[Dutch Gun]

Yeah, I agree with your post, right up until you talk about being "stuck" on Windows 7 and IE 8. If we're going to be honest, most of the crap people are dealing with is because of poor coding standards which were allowed (and encouraged, in fact) by previous versions of operating systems and browsers (for instance, users running as an admin by default). I'm not sure about the browser side of things, but I do know a bit about Windows development. If you write an app for Windows today and follow best practices, there's nothing that prevents your app from moving forward. For the most part, Microsoft is really good at preserving backward compatibility, which is why businesses love them. In this particular case, they happened to screw up pretty badly, and everyone except the devs who originally shat out these crappy IE apps are paying the price.

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget that Netscape took their eyes off the prize, started charging for their increasingly bloated software, and wanted to become an OS company. MS offered its browser for free. Netscape is responsible for some of this mess. And Netscape also had proprietary HTML code samples that would only work in Navigator/Communicator. In fact, Netscape started it off with the first code that only worked with its browser.

This isn't a case of integration vs separate, it's a case of honoring standards or thumbing your noses at them. And in the browser wars, everyone, including Netscape and Microsoft, did their own share of nose-thumbing.

Let's try to keep some perspective, mmmmkay?

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[StormReaver]

would like to once again take this opportunity to say "I told you so" to all of the idiots who wanted IE...

Everything you said after this point was superfluous. Absolutely correct, but totally redundant.

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[R.Mo_Robert]

I'm running IE9 beta on my Windows 7 machine at home.

You missed the point, which was that people will be stuck on IE 8 with Windows 7 because the pages will be coded for IE 8, which wont' run on Windows 9--just like how IE 6 won't run on Windows 7 now. (Nobody said that IE 8 wouldn't run on XP, which is like you having IE 9 on Windows 7.)

I'm not sure I agree with the point because IE 6 is exponentially more awful than IE 7/8 (especially 8), but we'll see.

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running IE9 beta on my Windows 7 machine at home.

So? The point was that the development teams doing the patching on these crappy apps will just switch the IE6 non-standard behavior for IE8 non-standard behavior which will break instantly in IE9 ironically which is actually compliant by default for a change.

Prove that the problem isn't due to the IE6 installer (can you even download it (legally) any more?) doesn't expect certain specific versions of Windows and refuse to run if the version string doesn't match.

Ha, you clearly have never investigated how Windows works. Internet Explorer is actually tiny, if you look in Program Files and examine the contents, you'll find there is really next to nothing in there — just a GUI shell and some support crap. The core, the crux of how the whole thing works is in System32, Windows' HTTP fetch, Trident HTML rendering and JavaScript engine are all Internet Explorer components. Replacing those with IE6 versions will break half the system and some third party apps as well.

Re:This is why "integration" is bad. Hmkay?

[tuppe666]

I missed your point too. I thought your point was those the 60%+ of XP users will never be able to use IE9. It makes migration a very interesting issue.

Easily fixable!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of our clients (at 360is.com) have tens or hundreds of applications that were written years ago and run only on IE6. The solution is simple and inexpensive, just run IE6 off of a Citrix Presenatation Server (XenApp) platform. Users get their nice new Windows 7 desktop while not one line of code is changed in their "legacy" applications.

The whole thing can be planned in a day or 2 and executed over a few weeks.

Simples (sic).

Gotta love

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta love how IE6 is screwing over its maker more than anyone else these days ;) Now that it suits them, they need their customers to upgrade up to Windows 7 but what are probably some of their most lucrative customers can't do so because they are so heavily invested in IE6 !

Inhibits?

[Squeebee]

If 175 million copies sold (a new record for Microsoft) is inhibited sales, I'd like to see what the uninhibited sales numbers would have been.

Re:Inhibits?

[Squeebee]

Correction, 240 million.

Yay!

[Arancaytar]

I am at risk of foaming at the mouth when I think of IE6, but the news that it is hurting adoption of Windows 7 and costing MS profits puts a smile on my face.

Karma-rific!

I have experience with this...

[JMZero]

MS really screwed this one up, and I don't think they even really saw it coming.

For example, a lot of IE-specific web software from around 2000 used the DHTML edit control. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable option to, for example, add spellcheck into a web form and have a reasonable UI. Some of our pages used it. Yes I know it sounds dumb now, but 2000 was a long time ago and the set of options was very different. Things weren't the same. The amount of stuff you could do in a cross-browser friendly page was limited, and the amount of work to get it working was much greater.

When they decided to get rid of it (for Vista) the only notice I found was in some MS blog which pretty much read "we looked around the web and it didn't seem like many people were using this, so we're getting rid of it to have a smaller security surface area". Oh, and by the way, we'll give ourselves plenty of time to stop using it in Outlook Web Access. But yeah, no option to leave it available for trusted sites or something, just "screw you". Now, to be clear, there's replacements for that functionality in modern browsers, but nothing was a drop-in replacement and it was still a pain for a lot of users.

And it's not MS's normal MO... a lot of the reason they've done well over the years is understanding how glacially slow businesses can move and keeping software functional long after its natural expiry date. I think they just really didn't know people were using that, and they're only now starting to pay attention to people who are dealing with this - years after the mistake of not providing an easy transition.

Our internal site still uses IE custom print templates (to get well formatted boilerplate text on pages, allow interactive, persistent control of page breaks, and otherwise ensure consistent printing of HTML). These have been around and unchanged since IE 5 I think, and have been working for us since around 2000. But I know one day they'll just be gone. Again, I'm sure there will be some replacement tech - but I fully expect MS not to give a crap about how we transition.

Re:I have experience with this...

[radtea]

At the time, it seemed like a reasonable option...

This is the problem, not any MS issue.

I recall glancing at some magazine for "Web developers" back in the early 2000's and it had completely idiot advice about getting objects back from the DOM and testing them to see if they supported specific methods, and basing the browser identification on that (rather than the spoofable user agent header) using invalid inferences like "only browser X supports method Y".

This is trivially wrong, but apparently it was promoted by "Web developers" as a best practice at the time, instead of the "built to break" practice it obviously was. No one with any real software development training or experience would ever do something so stupid as to deploy code that depended on a momentary snapshot of current capabilities to make inferences about the environment the code was running in, but in those days the attitude was "everyone can be a developer!"

Re:I have experience with this...

[JMZero]

Actually, I'd go back and change that if I could. Not the choice we made, but what I wrote up there. At the time it not only seemed like a reasonable option, it was a reasonable option - and overall it turned out quite well for us.

We switched to a completely web based system long before our competitors could, and that required implementing a lot of features quickly (such as functional document editing and printing in the browser). I don't think there was any better option than what we did back then, at least not one we could implement in time. It was really only an odd choice if you imagine that we had the choices available now back then.

And the site we made was very successful. Our market share is 5 times what it was in 2000, largely because we were able to do stuff online our competitors didn't (and it's not like we're an online company - we're a brick and mortar company that had been around long before the web). And it hasn't cost us much time to switch out techs as better things have become available. The IE only website that seems like an abomination now was, looking at the results, the most important and best tech choice we ever made.

But yeah, that still doesn't mean MS didn't bone the transition.

Re:I have experience with this...

[Dutch Gun]

a lot of the reason they've done well over the years is understanding how glacially slow businesses can move and keeping software functional long after its natural expiry date.

See, that's the thing about businesses. They don't understand why software should have an expiration date. And honestly, I have to agree with them to some degree. Case in point: my parents' business is using a custom piece of software written specifically for their business. It's a DOS app, and was created a little under two decades ago. The thing is, all their people know how to use it and it does the job well enough. In fact, it works better on more modern OSes than on the original DOS machines (who remembers Lantastic networks?). Why should they spend a huge amount of money upgrading to a modern system? It's not like the code degrades over time, right?

It's easy for us as developers to froth about people using decades-old software, because we live and breathe in the high-tech, shiny NOW of technology, but to businesses, software is just a tool, no more exciting than a copy machine. They just want the technology to work and stay out of the way of their actual job.

IE6 FOREVER

[digitaldc]

Nothing will ever make me let you go, you are the one IE6.

As flawed as you are, I just got used to having you around.

It must be the "6"

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be the "6": IE6, VB6, VC6

All workhorses.

Use XP Mode

[geekoid]

Works great.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

People HAVE gone 100% Apple

[SmallFurryCreature]

You must be young because ONCE people DID go 100% Apple. Just as once they went 100% IBM. Apple was big in education once.

But the problem here is NOT choosing Microsoft. It is by choosing a very specific set of tools that MS then dropped like the pile of trash it was. MS does this a lot. That is why you should NEVER use the greatest and latest until it has been around for a decade and has been proven to have stable support. Yes .NET developers, I am looking at you. What makes you think MS won't pull an activeX on you?

The mess with IE6 is not just activex, it is a whole shitload of choices, includinging IE only HTML that turn the projects into the crap they are.

But these projects didn't come out of nothing. I am willing to make a bet: Every single IE6 only application is a piece of crap to begin with regardless of its environment produced by a company that is clueless about IT in general. It ain't the clever people who walked into this trap. Just the kind of development environment where knowledge of Excell and Word is a must have to be hired. Run hard, run fast if you EVER see this listed.

These weren't smart people making a dumb choice, these are dumb people who made a dumb choice and now continue to make it. And good luck changing this, because if you say it, then your boss has to admit he has been very stupid.

The old "No-one has ever been fired for choosing IBM" really is "No-one has ever been fired for making the same choice as your boss".

Frankly, let these companies rot. They can force IE6 only browsers but the world isn't going to wait for them any longer. As a web developer I noticed that IE6 has long been dropped as a requirement. No customers use it. If you are still on IE6, you ain't worth catering too. It would be like Harrords having a homeless section. What would be the point.

Linux

[edcs]

Why don't they move over to Linux? IE6 has had a Linux port for a long time that works perfectly, and it would allow companies to run IE6 in a modern operating system safe enough to moot the security concerns that come with IE6 to some extent.

Re:Linux

[Just Brew It!]

Not practical for most businesses. An organization that has invested a lot in IE6-specific web apps is likely to be tethered to Microsoft in other ways as well (MS Access databases, existing MS Office documents that don't import cleanly into OpenOffice, etc., etc., etc.)

Unless the PCs are only being used as dumb web terminals, the cost of retraining users and IT staff to use Linux is also going to be substantial.

Furthermore... IANAL but running IE on Linux is probably a technical EULA violation as well. Even if it is a non-issue from a practical standpoint (would MS ever go after users for doing this? probably not...) if it ain't legal, this is going to prevent a lot of corporate IT managers from even considering it.

Some of them haven't even tried their apps in IE8

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give good money to bet that some of those web apps would actually work just fine in IE8 (or would work with minimal changes), it's just that the companies involved haven't bothered to try.

I know of one case where the company had an app which they swore blind would only work in IE6 because of the ActiveX control used for date fields. But when they actually tried it in IE8 it was fine (barring a few layout gremlins, which they were sensible enough to decide they could live with). They just hadn't bothered to try because they had convinced themselves it wouldn't work.

Of course, it certainly didn't work in any other browser, but at least it allowed them to upgrade away from IE6 and XP.

EEEF

[mangu]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, FAIL

Yup, we've got IE-specific apps where I work too

[Just Brew It!]

At least they're not IE 6 specific; they work OK with IE7/8. In fact, about a year ago we we instructed to do a "search and destroy" on any remaining copies of IE6, as they didn't want to have to deal with IE6 security vulnerabilities any more.

I'd much rather use Chrome though. The IE-specific intraweb apps are among the last few remaining things that are forcing me to maintain a Windows VM on my desktop system -- my primary desktop OS is Linux these days. (Another thing still tethering me to Windows is Outlook; last time I tried using Evolution to talk to the corporate Exchange server things did not go well. I should probably give Evolution another chance; my last attempt was nearly 2 years ago. Hopefully Evolution's Exchange integration sucks less now.)

Are you kidding me?

[Anonymous Coward]

First, outlawing victimless self-destructive sins like smoking is not only absurd and pointless, it's immoral and unjust. I don't give a damn how many supporters you have -- my individual liberty is more important than your pipe dreams (and no, I don't smoke).

Second, are you even remotely aware of the lessons of alcohol and drug prohibition? Those laws sure as hell didn't reduce the number of alcoholics and drug addicts. What they DID accomplish is to rake billions of dollars through the hands of the elite who run the business of prohibition, as well as causing the violent crime rate to skyrocket (thus providing justification for even more government spending).

Let's call a spade a spade here. Prohibition isn't for your benefit, let alone the benefit of society; it's for the benefit of the elite at the top of the pyramid who control the cash flow.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[ByOhTek]

For the most part, I agree with your points, but smoking IS NOT victimless.

Second hand smoke is quite dangerous. People who lose family due to sickness caused by first or second hand smoke are most certainly victims.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Artefacto]

Smoking in not a choice; for the vast majority of the smokers, it's an addiction. These people don't smoke because they want to, they smoke because they can't help it. So the point of personal liberty is very weakened.

Doomsday

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for someone to release a series of worms and viruses to wreck computers with IE6 on them into oblivion.

Standards are not the issue

[js3]

Having experienced this recently, where thousands of employees have to rely on a tool that only works with IE6, it's not something simple like CCS or scripting or some standards problem. This is large scale applications written entirely in Activex for IE6. Microsoft over the IE versions has changed Activex (for the better?) but that's the cause of the incompatibilty. I know one written by HP (not naming the app name) and deployed for thousands of users.. I bet HP doesn't even support it anymore and the company using it can't unless they migrate to an entirely new system.

There are two ways around it.

1. Don't upgrade IE on your machine or one of your machines
2. Install a VM with IE6 and fire it up when you need to use the tool.

Surprisingly (2) seems a lot easier to do from experience. VM's are a dime a dozen these days.

Re:Standards are not the issue

[assertation]

Thanks for the interesting reply.

I had long ago forgotten about ActiveX.

I think more than one company has made the mistake of choosing a technology without thinking things all of the way through as to whether or not that technology would be supported in the future.

A number of companies thought Microsoft was a safe bet and ActiveX was long enough ago to not be acutely aware of Microsoft making new versions of things that are not compatible with older versions.

FOSS has been proven to be the safer bet. Even if all development stops on a technology, it is still there, it isn't removed from being used. You can also get the source code and you can likely find some forum someplace to get questions answered.

Unfortunately the safety issue looks inverted to managers. FOSS looks like the more dodgey choice ( nobody to send an angry letter or legal threats too if something goes wrong ) while going with a big company does.

Probably the worst choice is going with proprietary technology from a small company. I've worked for companies that did that and got stuck with dead software they had to rebuild in something else.

Re:Standards are not the issue

[MightyMartian]

Microsoft spent five or six years actively pushing ActiveX everywhere. They built their entire development platform on top of it during that period. They pushed it for Internet Explorer beginning as far back as IE3, but certainly by IE4 and IE5 they were talking about it as the "preferred" way to do development; whether console-based or web-based. They only began to shift gears with .Net and with the rise of Ajax, and more to the point as it became clearer and clearer that the whole security model they had put in place dating back to Windows 95/98, with everyone effectively an administrator, had basically turned Windows and IE into one big malware platform. Then suddenly we see IE7, with at least some effort to bring it into the fold of reasonable browsers.

We *should* all write crapware.

[postermmxvicom]

Yes, that's it. We should all write crapware with planned obsolescence. There is no room for well written software that lasts more than two years I say.

Addiction this, addiction that

[noidentity]

Nice, yet another "addiction". Maybe we can misuse the word into meaninglessness in a few years.

Simple Solution

[kevinmenzel]

Run IE6 in "XP mode", available in Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Come on, is this really that hard? You can put the icon on the desktop and everything!

Re:Simple Solution

[canajin56]

It only works on a CPU that supports hardware virtualization (Intel's VT or AMD's AMD-V). So the low/mid range processors a business has might not work unless they are quite new. I suppose if they're buying all new Windows 7 boxes they can certainly use XP mode. But if they're upgrading existing machines, it might not work.

Re:Simple Solution

[Nimey]

That's no longer true. MS have released a patch allowing it to run on non-virtualizable processors.

Re:Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work when they use Citrix Metaframe... Metaframe only installs on a specific version of Windows server.

Re:Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just run IE6 on Linux with wine, it's getting pretty stable now...

Re:Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

So simple that it often gets overlooked. This is a non-issue, no additional costs, no licensing issues, etc. Free for business users (you already have Pro+ versions installed), and the end user doesn't even know the difference (they don't have to "boot" a VM, login, etc, its all integrated). I think Slashdot has too many people using Linux who don't even know what is available or how to properly use the tools MS provides. I'd it being deployed remotely, at our office for a while. Now its just in our images, so not a big deal. BTW, I'm not a MS fanboy, just stuck at an MS shop. My personal servers are 90% Linux/BSD, and I have 4 desktop OS's I use regularly (Win7/XP/Ubuntu/OS X).

Re:Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtualise an entire OS so that you can use a browser in it. Plus, that OS is the old OS you are trying to get rid of.

It will be interesting on that day when support has ended for WinXP and someone finds a massive bug in it. All those people who upgraded to Windows 7 but run anything in XP mode will be vulnerable to the bug. Will Microsoft fix the bug in the OS they no longer support? Will it be a for-pay patch or not at all?

Move to something standard now and it will most likely work with the next browser and the one after that.

IE6 Compatibility Mode

[butlerm]

The big mistake that Microsoft made was adding features / behaviors to a version of their web browser that they did not plan on supporting forever afterward. The only straightforward way for Microsoft to remedy the problem is to add an IE6 compatibility mode to IE8 and 9.

I don't know the details of the behaviors of IE6 that many of these web apps depend on, but it can't be that hard. They have all of this compatibility mode infrastructure already set up to support IE7, how hard can it be to add support for another version?

Re:IE6 Compatibility Mode

[MightyMartian]

That would certainly work for DOM and CSS oddities, but there's another group of apps; ActiveX/COM-based web apps which represent not only a challenge for the browser, but also for the underlying operating system. Simply put, there are a good many ActiveX-based web apps out there that even if you made an IE6 mode for newer versions of IE would still break because the ActiveX controls are so badly or insecurely written that the operating system won't touch them, at least not without turning off a lot of the functionality which makes newer versions of Windows safer. The solution there, seemingly, is sandboxing in a VM, but that means a cost not only in the right edition of Windows (maybe not a problem in the corporate environment where everyone is running Pro editions), but that does have a hardware cost, not to mention the fact that you're still running potentially vulnerable apps.

The price of lock-in

[mcrbids]

Everybody wants to be needed. And a common tactic is to try to make yourself irreplaceable. This is a common strategy at work - the programmer who intentionally codes in an incompatible way just so that he'd be needed to make heads or tails out of the spaghetti work.

This was specifically Microsoft's goal with IE 6: to promote and build a standards-incompliant browser, and use their market leverage to make their non-standard extensions part of the platform that they sold. It was all about lock-in.

Everybody around here moaned and wailed about what a horribly bad awful nasty double-plus ungood idea this was for the sorry victims of Microsoft's strategy. What we didn't realize is that one of those victims would be Microsoft!

Re:Windows XP Mode

[DocSavage64109]

I was about to write about how Windows XP Mode only works on certain processors, but apparently Microsoft has patched this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/windows_vpc/archive/2010/03/19/windows-virtual-pc-and-windows-xp-mode-no-longer-require-hav-processors.aspx

Isn't this really Microsoft's own fault?

[ndtechnologies]

I mean, they're the ones that pushed it so hard back in the early 2000's. You reap what you sew...right?

Mistakes?

[QuietLagoon]

IE6 is estimated to have roughly 16% of browser market share, and due to mistakes in the past it may never truly die."

I do not think they were "mistakes" in the past. On the contrary, they were conscious decisions on Microsoft's part to make IE6 incompatible, thus making developers write pages for IE6 (~runs better on IE6~). It was Microsoft's attempt to kill non-Microsoft web standards.

Now Microsoft is haunted by their own strategy.

Re:Mistakes?

[Anonymous Coward]

a decision that you make, that turns out not to have been very good, is called a mistake. an example of a mistake might be making a post that tries to nitpick semantics, without having a firm grasp on the semantics in play.

Re:Mistakes?

[QuietLagoon]

I was using the word "mistake" in the more narrow sense of what is now know to be a mistake, only became to be known as a mistake with the passage of years of time. As opposed to knowing the mistake was made at the instant it happened.

.

But your point it taken. A wider interpretation of the word mistake can take into account the full timeline of an event or action.

Firefox - IE Tab anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox - IE Tab anyone?

Open Source Solution?

[seven of five]

Firefox/Chrome plug-in that emulates IE6?

Re:Open Source Solution?

[H0p313ss]

Firefox/Chrome plug-in that emulates IE6?

Non-trivial, but it could be very profitable.

Spending either way

[Anonymous Coward]

"Either spend time and money to upgrade those applications so that they work in newer browsers, or spend even more money dealing with security issues MS won't fix in Windows XP and missing new features that will make life easier and then bang head on wall when new hardware no longer works in Windows XP and your licenses aren't transferable anyway"

Fixed that for you. Now it's easy to pick a solution! But you'll just go with the short term one won't you.

Surprise, surprise

[Ray]

That's what happens when you write to the browser rather than writing to the standards. We've never had that problem because we write to the standards then tweak to IE.

Corporate Reality

[whosaidanythingabout]

As a product manager for a SaaS provider our largest client ( a very large chemical company that you all know of ) is stuck on IE6. No matter how much we plead with them the group we deal with has their hands tied because the IT department refuses to upgrade. Having worked in IT in the past it is understandable. There are HUGE costs associated with the migration of thousands of user desktops to a new browser and the users are never going to be allowed to install anything on their desktops themselves. So it is a stalemate. Out newest applications appear flawed on IE6 due to javascript memory leaks. We have told support to inform users to just stop and restart their browser when the performance is unbearable. I can only pray that IE6 never runs on Windows 7 or we will prolong the pain and suffering.

Re:Corporate Reality

[rhizome]

No matter how much we plead with them the group we deal with has their hands tied because the IT department refuses to upgrade

This is what's called "a bad client." It's analogous to writing your code for them in VB4 because they don't want to "upgrade" to msvcrt50.dll (or whatever it was called). I understand that as a large company they may have yours over a barrel and that you really don't have any choice if you want to survive, in which case you should be treating them as if they're asking you to write in COBOL. Why does IE6 cause peoples' brains to forget this basic-business stuff? You start charging $400/hr to implement IE6 and you'll see companies figuring out how to upgrade their standard browser.

Re:Corporate Reality

[gstrickler]

Tell them to try Chrome. Users don't need any special permission to install it into their own profile. Of course, their IT Dept could push out an administrative install, which would be a lot smarter on their part, but user's can install Chrome without any special access.

Re:Corporate Reality

[satuon]

Could they use Chrome Frame?

Virtual App

[Sprouticus]

This is a non issue. Run IE 6 in APP-V as a Citrix streaming app, or on a Citrix server. costs far less than redesign and works just fine. That gives you plenty of time to fix the problem and still goto IE8 or 9 as your standard.

One final comment, I find it odd that the same peole who designed COBOL apps and mini computer apps and Windows 16 bit apps did not see the fact that IE6 would go away in a relatively short period of time when they were crating their web apps. Just ploain stupid and they get what they deserve.

Here is another thought...

[Blinkin1200]

For years, Microsoft has given us products that were 'good enough' to ship. The market may have determined that XP and IE6 are 'good enough' to meet their needs and now have no urgent reason to go through the time and expense of upgrading.

Just say no

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to completely get rid of IE6 is to stop developing for it.

Microsoft's lock-in has bit it's own ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, we now have the best excuse why you don't write applications on the microsoft platform. When Microsoft want's to obsolete it, your apps are history.

Let me bring up one major vendor who I know is likely still running this:
AT&T, And Seibel systems (now owned by Oracle).

Re:Microsoft's lock-in has bit it's own ass

[Anonymous Coward]

eBay uses a CRM program that only works in IE, but it's because the vendor's javascript is a sloppy mess and eBay did a poor job integrating it, which results in it "looks like it works" in firefox, but doesn't actually.
eBay also has another program that is written using the IE browser engine which I probably shouldn't name, however it's written in C++ and could be roughly described as "tabbed MSIE6".

What do you expect? I expect standards

[Kludge]

If your corporate IT standards mandate ...

That's the point: standards.

Unless your company is developing its own browser and its own OS, making it's own corporate standard on browsers is stupid.
The standards that should have been followed here are the W3C standards. Not the "standards" of one company with one browser on one operating system.

Before 2000 there were computer standards in place. Not following those standards is now an obvious huge failure and now companies will be paying for it.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[gorzek]

IE was (and still is, in some places) a de facto standard. Calling it "stupid" doesn't change that fact.

Back around 2000 the browser wars were very much alive and compliance with W3C standards was largely mythical, to say nothing of fractious JavaScript implementations.

Corporations had to settle on something. Microsoft won out primarily because the browser was a) bundled and b) made by the same company as the operating system. It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.

We can look back now and say it was stupid to standardize on a browser with such a non-standard implementation, but that's because we have the benefit of various standards-compliant browsers now, and the notion that you should be able to view a particular site with any browser you choose has achieved wide penetration. At the time, it was thought one browser would "win" and control the standards for all practical purposes, and most people banked on Microsoft. It was an understandable gamble at the time even though it looks foolish in hindsight.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[rolfc]

Of course it is stupid, we all knew what was going to happen and still many dig them self deep into Microsoft software. It is plain stupid.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[bunratty]

Corporations should have insisted that their web applications *worked* on some other browser, even if they were standardized on *using* IE. A web application that ran on Mozilla or Opera in addition to IE 6 would allow corporations to switch away from IE 6.

There's a world of difference between standardizing on using version X of product Y, and trying to pretend that any other products and any other versions do not exist. If your specifications state that a solution must work only on version X of product Y, you will have vendor/version lock-in.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[gorzek]

Actually, we didn't all know that Microsoft would lose the browser wars. Remember, at one time they had very close to 100% market share in the browser space. Had they maintained such dominance they would have effectively controlled Web standards. It wouldn't matter what the W3C said, it would only matter what Microsoft implemented.

People also assumed Microsoft would maintain backward compatibility as they'd done in large part since the MS-DOS days. It was not clear that MS would eventually abandon their custom HTML implementation in favor of W3C standards--and they only did so because adoption of other browsers forced them to.

Once again, it's unfair to take the situation in hindsight and say everyone who settled on IE6 was stupid. From a corporate standpoint, it was the most attractive of limited options.

Anyone choosing to standardize on a specific browser now, I would call a fool: the implementations are similar (and compliant) enough at this point that if your site doesn't work on all major browsers, you're doing something wrong. We also have much better tools now. The situation today is just a lot different than it was when IE6 came out, and it should be examined accordingly.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[gorzek]

You are absolutely right, but the prevailing sentiment was "get it working on IE," not "get it working on IE and at least one other browser." When you've got a deadline you aren't going to go out of your way to do beyond what was requested. Companies asked for applications that ran on IE, 6 was the dominant version at the time, and so they got applications that only worked on IE6.

I don't think it was intentional to lock people into a specific version of IE, but rather than IE's implementation has changed so drastically since then--something vendors probably didn't anticipate. MS normally at least pays lip service to backward compatibility, but didn't bother at all where IE6 is concerned.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[TheRaven64]

Back in the distant past, there used to be the notion of a second source. That is, for every product that you buy - especially ones that your business depends upon - you should have at least two potential suppliers, even if you never actually bought anything from the second one. There are several reasons for this. If the first supplier goes bust, you have a backup. If there is a second supplier, then the first supplier can't raise prices too much or they will suddenly find that they are no longer the first supplier.

Back when IBM made the PC, they insisted on a second source for every single component, with two exceptions. The BIOS, they wrote in house. The operating system, they regarded as a commodity, which therefore didn't need a second source. You'd think that other companies might learn from this mistake.

Part of the economic attraction of open source is that it automatically comes with a second source; any open source product that you buy (by definition) comes with the rights to get someone else to maintain it for you.

If you build your internal infrastructure on top of one company's products and do not have an alternate supplier, then you are saying to that company 'we are willing to pay whatever you decide to charge in the future'. This was known well before IE4 was released, and I was certainly not the only person at the time saying that building intranet sites depending on a particular browser was a stupid idea. I have absolutely no sympathy for companies that decided to save a small amount of money in exchange for a large cost later on.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[Low Ranked Craig]

While I agree with what you are saying to a point, a large part of moving toward browser deployed applications was less maintenance AND the ability to keep desktops current and / or not have to worry about the desktop OS. They got the less maintenance part but failed on the latter.

The "experts" who were driving in this direction for the most part ignored the upcoming standards to their and Microsoft's detriment. Microsoft, as they usually do decided to be their own standards body, and this is the result. Even today IE8 isn't all that good from a standards perspective.

The blame lies equally with Microsoft and the companies who continued to add on to the existing mess and not move toward standards compliance even when it became clear in the early 2000's that Microsoft was not going to dominate the browser market.

Microsoft's continued arrogance in the area of standards, as indicated by the poor shoring of IE8 indicated to me that they either don't get it, or they don't care.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[bunratty]

My point wasn't that it was intentional. My point was that it was in fact unintentional, but anyone could have seen it coming. I remember those who insisted that all that matters is that it works in IE 6 because that's what everyone was using. I responded to them by saying that there's no guarantee it will work on another browser, another OS, or even another version of IE on Windows. I suppose those people are now saying, "Oh, now I understand what that guy was trying to explain!" Oh, who am I kidding. They forgot what I said five minutes after they dismissed it offhand.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[LWATCDR]

I don't agree.
By writing to one browser devs where deciding to close what was supposed to be an open technology IE the web.
Even when IE was 99% of the market I insisted that we develop for both Netscape and IE. Boy did I get a lot of heat from one lazy web developer over that. He got offended when he say take a look at this and I would fire up Firebird to look at it. My response was it looks like junk. He would say look at it in IE and I would refuse and tell him to not bother to show it to me until it works in both.
Of course now that we have standardized on Firefox with a few people using Chrome it all seems very logical.
Of course no one remembers the crap they gave me.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[jc42]

Corporations had to settle on something.

No, they didn't. Any manager with even minimal competence understands that the computer industry has always been in a state of rapid change. Nobody with a grain of sense will "standardize" on something that's controlled by another corporation and likely to change in unpredictable ways in the near future. Standardizing on IE was a sign of incompetence; standardizing on one version of IE was (and still is) a sign of utter, hopeless incompetence.

Sensible managers (and I've known a few of them) knew all along that the sane approach has always been to treat the browser arena as highly unstable. Sensible business practice is to plan for the changes that you know will come, and demand that your own web stuff be as generic as possible. It's easy enough to collect a set of browsers and test against all of them. I've done this since the Web became the hot new thing, and so have lots of other people. Not doing this may be common business practice, but it's still a sign of incompetence.

It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.

Indeed. And it's a good example of the short-sighted "don't look beyond the current fiscal year" attitude of much of the corporate world. We've known for a couple of centuries that this leads to economic disasters. The people who make corporate decisions like this should be exposed and ridiculed in public. They shouldn't be held up as example of "how things are done".

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[rolfc]

It was well known that it was proprietary, and I was warning people then and I warning them today.

It is not hindsight and Microsoft was already well known to lock their customers in then, as they are now. Just because you don't want to know, it doesn't mean that the rest of us don't want to know

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[Chaostrophy]

Microsoft pushed hard to get people to code to IE6, and to use Active X (security? what security?), resulting in something that is stuck on one version of one browser. It was clear at the time to me that this was a bad idea, frankly, I'm just glad it turned out to be even worse (MS was forced to clean up their act, thus breaking compatibility with IE6).

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[hairyfeet]

I would add that what everyone seems to be forgetting about that time is.../does Darth Vader voice...The power of ActiveX! /voice end. Folks you have to remember that when IE6 came out it gave the developer a HELL of a lot of power which made writing some pretty powerful "apps" using nothing but some code fed to IE. Hell that was the problem, in that whomever was in charge of security at MSFT wasn't there the week ActiveX came out and nobody seemed to realize having THAT much power over the OS might be a bad idea.

You could find out exactly what hardware they had through ActiveX, what programs they had installed, you could call just about any app that came with windows like WMP, hell even the lower level system apps like CMD, ActiveX just gave you crazy amounts of power. At the time I tried to warn some of the SMBs I was dealing with but I had to be honest and there simply wasn't anything that gave that amount of power using only the browser. Of course we know NOW that having that level of power is a supersized Bad Idea(TM) and that if you need that level of power it is better to write a native app that can take advantage of OS level security, but at the time we were still in the "On the Internet!" phase for the most part and companies wanted everything run through the browser. But part of the reason corps are not wanting to give it up is if you see what they have their "apps" doing frankly it would be a nightmare to recode that for any other browser, simply because you're not allowed those deep hooks.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[Anonymous Coward]

IE was (and still is, in some places) a de facto standard. Calling it "stupid" doesn't change that fact.

We get it. What you don't seem to get is that browsers are not "single purpose" systems, and that tying your company's policy to a specific browser version is a foolish mistake. Time has rolled on, and now these corporate "standards" are a hindrance.

Corporations had to settle on something. Microsoft won out primarily because the browser was a) bundled and b) made by the same company as the operating system. It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.

If that was the only issue, these companies wouldn't have slit their own throats with ActiveX, which is the IE6 component stopping migration to modern corporate standards/policies.

We can look back now and say it was stupid to standardize on a browser with such a non-standard implementation, but that's because we have the benefit of various standards-compliant browsers now, and the notion that you should be able to view a particular site with any browser you choose has achieved wide penetration.

We've had standards compliant browsers for many, many years.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[Kjella]

I wouldn't take IBMs practices in the early 1980s as good examples of anything, there's a reason they were completely toasted on price by the clones and it was because of decisions like this. Eventually people figured out it was cheaper to go with one clone and if that turned out crap then switch clones. The same goes for software, if open source means you have to pay ten times as much to develop it to do what you need rather than go with a proprietary vendor that has a tool that does what you want right now, you burn way too much money. But you have to manage how deep down the gravity well you go, to always know what it costs to say "fuck you" and rebuild around another vendor. It's not as instant as getting a drop-in replacement, but it's a lot cheaper. Of course, if you aim for the dead center of the black hole pulling you in you get what you deserve...

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[alexborges]

The sad reality is that IT departments have turned themselves actually in a specialized branch of the Purchases department, without any training in actually being good purchasers that look after the interests of the company that they work for.

NO, all of them have bought into the very strange idea that what vendors sell, is what they buy.

Hopefully, this will change with this kind of shenanigans exposed: companies got PLAYED by "startegists" that weree nothing short of microsoft SHILLS.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[lgw]

If you build your internal infrastructure on top of one company's products and do not have an alternate supplier, then you are saying to that company 'we are willing to pay whatever you decide to charge in the future'.

[boss]The future? The future? That's like a whole different quarter you geek! I'll be promoted and in a different job before the future happens. Sheesh, don't you understand anything?!? What's the cheapest possible way to get this problem solved now? To Hell with the future![/boss]

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[Lonewolf666]

There are still people who make similar mistakes. The company I work for ATM seems to tend towards "standardizing" development on C#, despite making devices that have at least some moderately strict real time requirements.

C# = very Microsoft-centric and locking you into Windows
Windows = not so good at timing-critical tasks

I see a comparable problem arising for this company :-(

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[Infernal Device]

Corporations had to settle on something. Microsoft won out primarily because the browser was a) bundled and b) made by the same company as the operating system. It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.

/quote>

That's the same mentality that led us to "to big to fail" and we're seeing how that turned out. Making a decision also implies being able to face the consequences of that decision and now it's time for consequences. Instead, they're trying to avoid them by forcing everyone else down to their level and retarding the development of the web.

Yes, Microsoft shares some complicity in this, but the bulk of it lies with the corporations who refuse to face the music and move on.

In this particular instance, I say: let the chips fall where they may. Regardless of the consequences.

And before anyone points out that it's easy to make that statement because I don't face the same consequences? You're right - I chose correctly.

For now.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was obviously stupid at the time, in the sense that the vendor lock-in was obvious and all the technical people (and many other reasonable people) were screaming to follow standards for the usual reasons. You just described why. Companies chose obvious vendor lock-in for perceived short-term gains and obvious long-term risks. Presumably, those who made that choice are not complaining about paying the obvious cost later when they rolled the dice and lost. They are happy they got 10 years, which is much, much better than I would've expected at the time. People that chose IE6 actually dodged a bullet, in my opinion. They got plenty of value.

It wouldn't have been stupid if there were no widely implemented standards that they could've followed. There were widely implemented HTML standards (and support wasn't "mythical", it was just content-oriented and not layout-oriented, so not always the right tool for the job), and widely implemented GUI API standards, and widely implemented print-layout standards. If people chose to ignore those standards and go with something like ActiveX in IE6, then I hope they had a good reason to do so. I don't dispute that it made sense for some people, even accounting for the obvious-at-the-time re-tooling costs when the up-and-coming platform-du-jour went away. But if they hoped or expected that such a thing would later become "The Web", that was definitely stupid, as everyone I know was yelling to Not Do That and explaining why, exactly in the same terms as today.

It's frankly not rocket surgery and I really don't understand why many folks that are usually hard-headed pragmatists turn into retards when it comes to some monopolist vendor that they've decided "won". Really, we don't yet have enough examples of how it is dumb to bet on a technology that Microsoft (or Apple or Intel or whoever) says will be the Next Big Thing? At least wait for them to prove it, e.g., if you had built Windows applications in C++ instead of IE6-based monstrosities, it would be distasteful but not risky. (Assuming you actually needed the glitz and you couldn't make an honest, content-based web application. And, again, I don't deny that the glitz is a business requirement for many cases.)

Just because something is "less hassle" or a "de facto" standard doesn't make it less insular or dumb to bet on it when it's quite obviously immature. Just because "everyone does it" doesn't make it good business, and doesn't make the person who made that decision any less wrong. If your job is making those decisions, following the herd blindly is stupid and derelict.

We all make mistakes, particularly of this type, but pretending they're not mistakes just gets them repeated next time Microsoft (or Apple or Intel or Cisco or whoever) produces some crap technology that either doesn't work or isn't yet proven to be more than a flash in the pan.

Let's not defend the assumption at the time that ActiveX + IE6 would work indefinitely. That's dumb, it was obviously dumb at the time, and not doing your job. The parent makes it sound like someone looking to build web applications could have reasonably chosen an IE6-specific web rather than the standards of the time, which I think is wrong.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[westlake]

Back when IBM made the PC, they insisted on a second source for every single component, with two exceptions. The BIOS, they wrote in house. The operating system, they regarded as a commodity, which therefore didn't need a second source. You'd think that other companies might learn from this mistake.

IBM had a second source in Digital Research and CP/M-86.

But CP/M-86 cost $240. $560, adjusted for inflation. PC-DOS cost $40. $93, adjusted for inflation.

There was never the slightest chance that the operating system for this new business-oriented PC would be anything other than a 16 bit CP/M clone.

The CP/M port to the PC would be trivial - and the eight bit PC for business use as good as dead in a year or two.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. Perhaps we didn't know that Microsoft would eventually lose the browser wars, but tech-savvy people left and right were saying that it was a bad idea to code for MS's non-standard browser, and advocating standards compliance. Obviously, the stupid business people didn't listen to the tech people, and now they're paying the price.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[sjames]

Funny thing though, even if IE had "won', they would still be up the creek today. The old apps won't run on a modern IE and the old IE won't run on a modern Windows.

They DID have a choice. It was and is possible to create apps that would run on more than just IE at that time, they just didn't bother.

It was rather silly to think that a particular version of IE would be around forever and perhaps moreso to think MS would actually get backward compatibility right (or even care about it).

There were plenty of warnings flying about the industry, they just pointedly ignored them. They have earned the "I told you so"s that are going around now.

Re:What do you expect? I expect standards

[drsmithy]

Before 2000 there were computer standards in place. Not following those standards is now an obvious huge failure and now companies will be paying for it.

A standard that doesn't provide the functionality you need can't be followed.

21st century

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the 21st century Corporate America. We (many of us without our heads stuck in the M$ sand) warned you years ago to not develop IE only interfaces. You didn't listen. You reap what you sow. I'm LMAO now. :) It's time for IT to suck it up, admit you #$%!@'d up, and rewrite to industry standards. Git 'er done now, the problem will only get worse if you keep your heads in the sand.

IE6 is the new COBOL

[Anonymous Coward]

...critical infrastructure for businesses 30 years after it should have been long dead.

Citrix is the way to go. XenApp - XenDesktop

[n2art2]

Your on the right track. The best solution for maintaining those applications that are dependent on IE6 (which is stupid from a developers perspective), would be to utilize Citrix XenApp.

Notice: I work for a major IT implementation and support company in the Omaha, NE area with a national customer base.

Many companies are migrating to virtual servers, virtual application publishing, and virtual desktops. Multiple reasons for this. servers is an easy one by now, so no need to discuss that reasoning. Applications and desktops, is where virtualization really gets moving right now. Give the end user a thin client (desktop or laptop models), or allow the end user to provide their own device, laptop, desktop, iPhone, iPad, agnostic of what OS is installed.

Then use Citrix XenDesktop, or Citrix XenApp and publish or push the work silo desktop, or applications only to the end user's device. Do, or don't support the user's end point devices, but focus support on the applications and servers only.

We are implementing this in a large number of corporations, and we use it internally as well. It is the way to go, hands down.

Think positive

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a developer, this means new/upgraded software to develop and thus new jobs!

Why? For the love of god WHY!

[SmallFurryCreature]

Are you seriously suggesting that the VOLUNTEERS working on Firefox 4.0 instead work on making Firefox into an IE6 compatible browser including closed source IE only extensions owned by MS and do all this to help out Microsoft so they can sell Windows 7 with IE8?

Can I have what your smoking?

And just what makes you think that companies who completly locked themselves into a MS setup would be willing to use opensource software?

What you and a lot of others don't get is that this IE6 lockin wasn't an accident. Companies went in with open eyes, believing that MS software was the future and that a web application that only ran on one browser was the sensible choice. These people can't be saved, they want a MS solution sold to them by a MS gold certified partner. That is what they paid for, that is what they got. Moving away from it all is EASY and the costs are NOT that high but these companies don't operate according to normal IT logic. These are companies that put all their finances in an excell sheet on someone's laptop. Stop thinking that people who produced ActiveX/IE6 solutions are capable of sound rational decissions. Everyone in IT knew it was a bad idea at the time but they made a deliberate choice to ignore the warnings.

But really, this is a non-issue. So what if IE6 is still used by some, the world moved on thanks to google. Nobody cares anymore about IE6 support and if that means you at some backwards company can't browse all the web... well thought shit. Find a job where IT is not run by MS fanboys or do not browse the web on your bosses time.

What is problem supposed to be? Employees can't access facebook? Not supposed to. Company at risk of security problems, not the problem of anyone else. Company might loose support on out of date software, again, not anyone elses problem.

Let IE6 keep hanging on, I and most of the rest of the world are done with it. You are not? Your problem. Not mine.

Bullshit.

[unity100]

these are all fancy talk and logic. let me tell you the real reason why people and businesses are not moving to win7 : what they have works fine enough for them. there is NO NEED TO UPGRADE.

Locked in by own lockin

[ardeez]

hehehe, vendor gets locked in by own lockin!

justice doesn't get more poetic than that ...

+667, SMITE THE UNCLEAN!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have about being a web developer and not an IE developer or flash developer?

MAUDE, PAY RENT OOP!!!!!


Unfortunately, there's enough jughead managers that don't see the value in a standards-based web.
They're so shortsighted, they probably don't even recognize the costs when it eats into their budget.

Re:entrenched

[TaoPhoenix]

"What's the matter? You look nervous. End of Line." / Tron

I don't begrudge it to them,...

[Anonymous Coward]

... neither Microsoft nor its customers. I honestly thank Microsoft for this lesson.

cb

IE6, Our Cobol

[lymond01]

I wonder if 2014 is going to be our Y2K with companies rushing to upgrade their applications before Microsoft cuts support. They'll need to find developers who are familiar with the old formatting tags and javascript hassles that IE6 brought with it. Bone up all you 5 digiters, we'll have need of your archaic experience soon enough!

slashdot's halloween story

[circletimessquare]

"IE6 is estimated to have roughly 16% of browser market share, and due to mistakes in the past it may never truly die."

you just put a chill down my spine and scared the heck out of me. congratulations slashdot, your tale of the undead is truly frightening and horrifying. well done, happy halloween!

Observation

[MBC1977]

Perhaps this is just my observation, but it seems that if you have 95% marketshare you are the standard, and that did not sit well with some people (due to some very rabid and intense hatred of Microsoft and a feeling that one company should not control a standard). Now I don't care either way, since personally IMO, one company controlling the show can be just as bad as a bunch of people controlling the show (both will make mistakes and / or move as slow as molasses).

That being said making snide comments about companies who deserve what they get because they did not think the way you (just a generalization of how a lot of technical types think, myself included) is tacky. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. Microsoft (a legally monopoly and convicted criminal), generally has always understood what most technical types fail to understand. Presentation matters. IE 6 was presented in a better way than what was out there at the time, and assumed that the market would standardize on their platform (a reasonable assumption when you have 95% marketshare and control a considerable portion of the consumer software ecology).

Re:Observation

[DunbarTheInept]

The alternate universe you live in is interesting. It would have been nice to see this IE 6 that actually had a better look than its contemporary competitors. It's too bad that the only IE I ever got to see was the ugly-looking one that existed here on earth where the rest of us live.

Re:Observation

[MBC1977]

IE 6 was better than Netscape's offerings (at the time).
IE 6 was better than Opera's offerings (at the time).

However, IE 6, lived far past its time (you could say by design, choice, whatever). My point being is that MS may not have had the best offering (technically or visually) but they had a "good enough" product with the right pricing (i.e. what the consumer was willing to pay). You can argue the semantics all day (and I would agree with most of them), but the bottom line is, is that consumers that generally use Microsoft products is similar to why Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer.

Its just "good-enough".

IETester

[CosmicDreams]

I don't understand what the problem is. If they really really need IE6 why can't they use something like IETester to run the IE6's rendering engine on a Windows 7 machine. I run that on my Windows 7 machine to test my websites for that browser and it works just fine.

Dear corporations on IE6:

[MattW]

Remember when we told you standards mattered, and cross-browser compatibility mattered?

Well, it was for your own good, as much as ours. My, how the tables have turned.

Free market solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, this may be extreme, but isn't there a very easy free-market solution to this?

If you know of a business that's IE6-addicted, just stop patronizing that business. Tell them exactly why, to which they'll probably give you a screwed-up face and ask you if you're serious, but if they see that their use of IE6 is costing them real money, they'll upgrade.

On the B-to-B side, that means not making anything compatible with IE6. If it's broken, "Sorry, we don't support IE6". Get it in the zeitgeist that using IE6 is tantamount to still using dial-up or Windows 3.11.

Don't take anyone serious that uses it (not that that's hard for this crowd).

Compatibility View

[trparky]

If you tell Internet Explorer 8 to run a web site in compatibility view, it will work just as it did in Internet Explorer 6. This is just an example of people being too fucking lazy and taking the easy way out.

An example on how to do this is here .

Gloat

[flyingfsck]

This is exactly what the FSF has been arguing against for so many years. It is hard not to gloat about it.

IE 5 to 6 vs. IE 6 to 7

[tepples]

IE6 was the ONLY browser that mattered

for all of a year: from late 2001, when IE 6 came out, to late 2002

It was already too late for the corporate world to code for Netscape. The key years were from 1997 to 2000 when

...IE was still 5.x. I would have replied differently had you explained how the transition from IE 5 to 6 was significantly easier than from IE 6 to 7 or to 8.

Re:IE 5 to 6 vs. IE 6 to 7

[Rockoon]

...IE was still 5.x. I would have replied differently had you explained how the transition from IE 5 to 6 was significantly easier than from IE 6 to 7 or to 8.

It doesnt matter what version IE was. The point being that since 95% of users were using IE thanks to netscapes monumental 4+ year blunder, there was absolutely no incentive to develop web pages that leveraged its particular quirks and non-standard behavior. Literally nobody used it and they had good reason not to.

So we have (A) all browsers had proprietary extensions prior to 2000. (B) netscape use was declining rapidly prior to 2000 because it fell way behind on features (3+ years without a single update!), and then it REALLY took a dive when 6.0 hit in 2000. and finally (C) "web standards" were pointless because no browser even came close to following them, that in fact Internet Explorer was the ONLY standard that mattered since 95% of the market ran it.

Netscape blundered its way into becoming completely irrelevant to developers. It was quite possibly the largest strategic mistake in software development ever made. From dominance to a nobody all because of a single development decision.

It wasn't until Mozilla approached version 1.0 that these was any reasonably standard rendering engine AT ALL that didnt crash all the time. This idea that Microsoft locked developers in is a joke. There wasnt any reasonable alternatives (something that didnt crash on half the pages on the internet) at all that didnt also present the same non-standard surface (such as Netscape 4)

How about Wine?

[guruevi]

Wine runs IE6 perfectly fine. In packages like CodeWeavers CrossOver you can 'bottle' the Wine environment and distribute it.

Off course, you'll need to convert to Mac or Linux but that's a feature and it's a lot cheaper.

Re:How about Wine?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOnWindows

Someone should get IE6-dependent companies to fund the work to complete this, so they can continue using IE6 under Windows 7.

Two possible solutions.

[GarryFre]

Run the IE6 apps in a virtual box. Safari has a developer agent for IE6. I doubt if it would work but hey its worth a try. I can't imagine an app that can't be reprogrammed or reverse engineered to do what they need.

Framed.

[tepples]

If they want to be able to get the pagehits from our users and all the other corporate users that are in the same situation they'll support IE6

Why can't they just support Google Chrome, Firefox, and IE 8+, and then have IE 6 to 7 users use the Chrome Frame plug-in? You keep your well-tested IE 6, and sites that opt in to Chrome using X-UA-Compatible get their Chrome, all in the same IE window.

Options.

[Anonymous Coward]

XP Mode via an Enterprise edition of Windows 7: Opens up a can of security holes, Networking configuration issues, licensing problems plus possible compatibility issues and it's time consuming to use. Hardware has to support it/have enough umph to make it run ok.

Multiple IE's: IE hacks need rewritten, possibility of Windows Updates permanently breaking the browser unexpectedly without recourse.

Terminal Connection/Remote Desktop to 2003 server: Expensive in network resources, inefficient, if files need moved pain in the rear.

Dual boot installation: Workable but a pain to implement enterprise wide.

Solution we use: Install VirtualBox onto everyone's machine with IE6, Configure the Windows 7 Local Firewall to block non-necissary web traffic in/out of the VM, Lock down the FSCK out of the VM locally which means it runs NOTHING but IE6 and IE6 only with a network folder going to the users desktop; user logs in via user account. Leave a cloned disk image in their VirtualBox HDD Folder; if the VM gets infected, a script "RELOAD6.CMD" is in system32 so a tech takes 5 seconds to fix it.

If that's too slow, user remotes into 2k3 servers.

Lesson: Webapps need to work in 3 major browsers when they're written. Not flawlessly, but they must work. If you're going to base your webapps off of one browser, shop around.

Lock-In

[bill_kress]

It works, bitches!

Mod Parent Up

[zooblethorpe]

Somebody please mod the parent post up. Second source (i.e. backup) is a fundamental part of proper risk management, something that the corporate world has largely fallen away from in certain aspects of IT.

<pure_speculation>Makes me wonder if the surge in MBAs over the past few decades has anything to do with this.</pure_speculation>

Cheers,

Wine?

[MMC Monster]

Anyone know if IE 6 will run on wine? If so, it should be (relatively) simple to run on a compilation of wine that runs on Windows 7.

"Agreements"???

[Runaway1956]

"companies are looking at virtualizing IE6 so that it can run on Windows 7 — even though Microsoft says this violates licensing agreements." A: What licensing agreement, exactly, does it violate? B: How can you call it an "agreement", when Microsoft dictates terms? There are no polls, no surveys, no give and take on these "agreements". C: ASSuming that it would actually violate some stupid "agreement" - if MS has any interest in keeping the market they enjoy now, it seems that MS would CHANGE the agreement to allow companies to virtualize IE6. D: How many people really give a small rat's ass about these EULA's and "agreements" anyway? If all the companies that believe they really NEED IE6 were to go ahead and virtualize, what is MS going to do? Send out something like the RIAA's Gestapo to arrest all the offenders? In short, MS is shooting themselves in the foot - or the balls - by denying these corporations permission to virtualize as needed.

Inevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

This all seems to be a moot point to me. I get that mistakes were made, however, updating software is part of the deal.. You'll never have software packages that you can just stop working on for decades at a time, and trying to do so seems like it will only hurt more as more time passes.

So I guess I'm confused about the decisions being made here.. I mean, do they expect it to get easier in 2 years? or do they think they'll always emulate IE6, until the end of time, or their company fails? My point is that as a company you've made a bad choice, and you're now going to have to eat the costs of that bad mistake.. do you want to eat it now, or eat it later? I can't imagine later being any better than now.

How 'bout the "haha" tag?

[zooblethorpe]

If ever Nelson's derision were appropriate, this is certainly such a case.

Talk about foot shooting and petard hoisting, and we can now point to IE6 as the archetypical example.

Cheers,

in otherwords.. blame Microsoft!

[josepha48]

No seriously, if MS had not led all these corporations to code to IE6 we would not all be stuck with IE6. I guess this is a little bit of a lesson for corporations, place NICE or we'll end up with crap for 10 year longer than anyone should have that crap.

MS should come up with a way for people to upgrade to IE7,8 and 9 and have a 'run in IE6' mode that is 100% compatible with IE6. This should be a switch that is set in a browser ( take a lesson from spoon.net/browsers MS!!!!). Then companies can deploy this with pre-configured sites and the end users will just get it and stuff will work. Doing so will allow us all to move off of IE6 quicker. Also they should update windows 2000 to IE7, because there are people that are still on that OS, or they should offer them XP/ upgrades dirt cheep.

And the name is perfect: say "AAIIEEEE!!!!!"

[zooblethorpe]

Cheers,

You're right!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft did indeed willfully, deliberately, and intentionally design IE6 to be a specialized non-standard browser with proprietary APIs in order to lock "Developers! Developers! Developers!" into focusing on it as a sole target platform to build their worlds upon. They succeeded.

Now Microsoft is discovering what it's like having to sleep in their own bed after they've peed in it.

Same mentality even today

[DrXym]

I'm working on a large project where the target browser is IE7. No consideration has gone into making it work on other browsers and as far as I can see there is no rationale for choosing IE7 either. It's nuts. Especially as the project is a rather large and requires good JS / DOM performance. Fortunately the project is built with GWT so in theory migrating to another browser is a matter of fixing stylesheets but this shortsightedness is just typical of large orgs. They don't realise a few years down the line what a millstone these limitations will be.

Vmware view

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's vmware view, it allows you to wrap an app in a virtual sandbox and run it on any windows version. Supports ie6 on windows 7 afaik. More future proof than xp mode.

Just migrate to Linux

[devent]

Just migrate to Linux and you have two choices. Number one is to run IE6 in Wine, there is a script with lets you install IE6, IE5 and IE5.5 on linux. The number two is to run Windows XP in VirtualBox (or any other virtual machine software), with the advantage of a secure and update system guarding the outdated and unsupported Windows XP. Since your web app should only need IE6 the switch to Linux should be very easy.

What are the odds that a "lesson" will be learned?

[erroneus]

Many people have been preaching the problems and woes of not being standards compliant and how dangerous MSIE is. Nobody listened. MSIE was "standard" and Microsoft was always a safe bet.

Now we see that the nut-case egg-heads were right after all -- not being standards compliant is a big problem for everyone including and especially for the party responsible for creating the vendor lock-in mess. (Yeah, that would be Microsoft. They knew what they were doing. I'm pretty sure they didn't expect it to bite them in the ass like this.)

So will business stop seeing Microsoft as a "safe bet" or will this problem get explained away in some way that doesn't make Microsoft look like a company that shouldn't be trusted?

You got played.

[alexborges]

Okay, you and your IT dept. are not stupid. You just got played by Microsoft shills that talked about "corporate strategy" as if it was in your best interest to lock yourselves into what was actually MICROSOFT'S corporate startegy.

They very much made you loose a wad of cash because you trusted a company without paying any regards to the fact they do EXACTLY what your company does: maximize profits and secure their position.

Let this be a lesson to you and move on.

They are XP apps, not Web apps, sue your developer

[gig]

The problem apps are Windows XP apps, they will have to be ported to the Web or another living platform before 2014 when Windows XP support ends. The fact that they depend on IE6 does not make them Web apps. There is no getting around it. Bite the bullet, hire an HTML5 developer and port your apps. The longer you wait and hope for some magic bullet, the less time you have to fix the problem.

I've been building HTML5 for some time and a significant amount of my work has been porting Windows XP and Adobe Flash apps to HTML5. In many cases, the clients originally asked for "Web apps" and were disappointed to find out later that is not what they got. So if you own such an app, you should look at your contracts and see whether there is grounds to sue your original developer for fraud. If your contract says "Web app" or "website" and you got an app that requires Windows XP or Adobe Flash, you should sue the developer for the cost of porting to the Web. In most cases, though, the contract will say the app requires XP or Adobe Flash and in that case you got screwed. So again, bite the bullet and port your app, and this time if you want a Web app that will last, put in the contract "platform-independent, hardware-independent, native W3C standard HTML5 Web application built to run without significant maintenance through 2020" and the developer will have to build a simple app on solid technical ground.

I built HTML4 apps in 1999 that still run perfectly today because they are just UTF-8, HTML4, CSS, JavaScript, PNG. And they can be upgraded to HTML5 very easily because they are just valid HTML4.

EEEE?

[TheReaperD]

Are you sure it isn't E^4? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, EPICFAIL

Memo to the "Open" fanboys

[FlyingGuy]

You all really just don't get it...

Ok so I am not saying MS didn't do something non-standard hell they did everything their own way, but they did what their customers wanted at the time, you know those folks, the ones that write checks that pay your salary and other things.

Like it or not, MS provides a highly compatible ( with itself ) solution from end to end. What they built into to IE6 was the ability to seamlessly integrate with Windows Services. ActiveX like it or not, and security issues asside, was perfect within the Windows ecosystem. It allowed the designer to take advantage of almost all of the Windows API and that allowed IE6 based applications to run very smoothly and that is what people ultimately want.

Like it or not no other browser could provide those capabilities. Things like real data aware grid components and fields that actually did data validation when you tried to move from one field to the next. Lets face it, HTML / CSS does not do that , even in HTML 5 in which no error checking is done until the onSubmit() event, and trying to do it in JavaScript is kludgey as hell because of the way scan codes are handle from the various OS's.

If a lot of the things MS did with IE6 had been published as open source I bet a lot of us would be using it today.

I don't like MS for many many reasons, but to say that IE6 was a mistake, in as much as functionality, is simply to ignore what the market wanted and that was a tool that they could easily develop web applications for business with and their overriding desire was NOT watching movies or playing video games.

In my personal opinion it is high time to develop a Application Browser that supports all the native UI components of Linux (KDE/Gnome), Windows and OSX and that is what I am doing to make things work for business. I have no problem with people wanting to watch movies and play video games and argue about JavaScript implementations and the like but business needs a tool that can run on all platforms, be simple and easy to develop with without having to worry about the utter insanity of the mashup of HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT/DOM that we currently find ourselves in.

No sympathy from this old-time slashdotter.

[DunbarTheInept]

No sympathy here. They get what they deserve. These are the myopic idiots that didn't care about the detrimental effects of vendor-tie-ins when they were hurting OTHERs with this garbage. They get no sympathy from me now that it's come full circle to bit themselves in the ass.

start WINEing

[oliverthered]

I expect I can run IE6 via WINE on linux with little or no problems.

Ah, the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but laugh.
Laugh at the fools and feel pity for them.
Feel pity for them and knowing that I made the correct choice.
The correct choice of not using IE.

The only way to solve this: Add ie6 to ie9

[SchizoDuckie]

If MS would *just* embed the ie6 render engine (a *PROPER* one, including the bugs and 'features') into ie9, the whole world would be able to finally move on. Please Microsoft, make us webdevelopers happy...

Firefox Plugin

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone could make a firefox plugin that emulates IE6.

virtualization

[virtuosonic]

this means now they can switch to linux, wine ca run ie6!

IETester or Spoon

[Anonymous Coward]

What's their problem? I'm using virtualized IE* instances to test web sites:
IETester
Spoon

If it's not legal, don't do it

[symbolset]

If it's not legal, don't do it. This is a pretty basic policy that covers pretty much the entirety of your comment, and it's a fairly standard policy in corporations, schools, state, local and federal government IT departments. I do believe that violating this basic policy is grounds for termination just about everywhere - at least everywhere I've ever worked.

If your software vendor wants to make it illegal for you to move forward in a functional fashion there is a solution for that that doesn't involve breaking the law. It also doesn't involve using the next version of their product.

Re:If it's not legal, don't do it

[Rich0]

I do believe that violating this basic policy is grounds for termination just about everywhere - at least everywhere I've ever worked.

Situations like this are rarely black-and-white. In any case, I wasn't advising anybody to take action like this without the full sanction of their corporate counsel - which means there would be no risk of termination. This is a company decision and not a personal one.

If the CEO asked the chief counsel about something like this, no doubt the advice they would get is that this is a legal gray area. The company could probably argue fair-use. So, this might be legal or it might not be. The company could be exposed to the publicity and general expense of a suit, but most likely MS isn't going to want to do that. If there was a suit, it is hard to see how anybody could argue damages - MS hasn't been deprived of any direct revenue since IE6 was paid for and Win7 was paid for. I'm guessing the overall advice of a corporate lawyer is to avoid the hassle if you can, but don't put the company at risk of a botched ERP upgrade just to rush in IE9 or whatever.

If your software vendor wants to make it illegal for you to move forward in a functional fashion...

Fortunately vendors cannot make things legal or illegal - the government does that. Software vendors merely grant licenses to copy their software. As with any contract, just because somebody wants to enforce or interpret it in a particular way doesn't mean that a court will let them do so. The law is what the courts say it is. And we're not talking about dumping toxins in rivers or civil rights abuses - we're talking about a software licensing dispute over software that was bought-and-paid-for.

Microsoft already did that.

[symbolset]

And then you'd have the thin and light performance profile of Windows 7, combined with the rock solid security of Windows XP with IE6. Brilliant!

Or Just install IE6 on Win7 ?

[CrashNBrn]

IE Collection contains the following versions of IE:

Internet Explorer 1.0 (4.40.308)
Internet Explorer 1.5 (0.1.0.10)
Internet Explorer 2.01 (2.01.046)
Internet Explorer 3.0 (3.0.1152)
Internet Explorer 3.01 (3.01.2723)
Internet Explorer 3.03 (3.03.2925)
Internet Explorer 4.01 (4.72.3110.0)
Internet Explorer 5.01 (5.00.3314.2100)
Internet Explorer 5.5 (5.51.4807.2300)
Internet Explorer 6.0 (6.00.2800.1106)
Internet Explorer 6.0 (6.00.2900.2180)
Internet Explorer 7.0 (7.00.5730.13)
Internet Explorer 8.0 (8.00.6001.18702)

I've installed it on Win2K (doesn't run 7 or 8 without DLL masking/wrappers), Vista, and Win7.

Re:Or Just install IE6 on Win7 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or (as mentioned below) [url=http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE]Multiple IE[/url], or [url=http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage]IE Tester[/url], or [url=http://www.spoon.net/Browsers/#IE]Spoon[/url].

Here's an idea that'll make everyone happy

[whong09]

Why not repackage those old IE6 apps as actual standalone programs. So instead of users launching IE6 to access the company accounting application by going to a URL, make programs that launch IE6 loaded onto a particular application. Users would click on an "Initech Accounting" program, for example, that directly links to the desired application. The browser would be modified to not allow using IE6 to browse to any pages outside of the application and would have the URL navigation bar and everything else removed.

Company computers would have these "programs" installed onto machines while still having a normal updated IE browser to do other web surfing tasks. This way the computers could shift over to Windows 7 and use the latest browser while legacy applications could still be accessed.

Forgive the marketing speak, but this would be a win win for all parties involved. Microsoft provides an alternative that allows businesses to switch to the latest software, businesses maintain access to their legacy applications, and the internet moves on from IE6 as everyone will be using a modern browser. Plus making the change to a legacy application should be fairly straightforward and painless. Just wrap IE6 and the application inside a "program" with no necessary changes to the actual code. Painless in comparison to rewriting the app from scratch.

What do you think? Am I missing the mark with this idea, what are some potential problems that could come up? Or should I contact Microsoft immediately and offer this solution.

IE6 - a major migration concern

[Anonymous Coward]

I have also found this issue to be a show stopper for any organisations looking to migrate to Win7. This compatibility issue was never a concern in previous OS migrations as the browser was not embedded into the OS as it is with Win7. Organisaitons need to consider two things as they look at the IE6 -IE8 issue - number of web apps within their application portfolio and their browser based applications -be they websites, intranets, extranets or portals -these must also be migrated and there can be significant compatibility issues within these areas