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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."
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.
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
Fear is the mind killer.
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.
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".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.