Slashdot Mirror
Who Is Still Using IE6? the UK Government
strawberryshakes writes "The death knell for IE6 was sounded a couple of years ago, but seems like some people just can't let go. Many UK government departments are still using IE6, which is so old — 11 years old to be exact — it can't cope with social media — which the government is trying to get its staff to use more to engage with citizens."
Good to see the US government isn't the only ones.
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They never buy NEW pc ?? Last time I installed some for my company I didnt had the choice, IE6 wasn't there...
IE6 is so old.
How old is it?
IE6 is so old, when it was a kid, it never blew out candles on its birthday cake. They didn't have fire yet
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"
my school in Germany also uses ie6. but well it is just a school, but because it is an integrated part in the it system of the town it is likely, that ie6 is used there as well.
The "Social media guidance" document on which this is based is an interesting read: http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/social-media-guidance
It's not about "letting go" - I'm sure it's about the cost of upgrading thousands (tens of thousands?) of systems. Not just the licensing of the software, but also the cost of execution and management of the upgrade, and then the upgrade of all the applications, training on new versions, rewriting an ass ton of security and management policies, and years of churn getting the kinks out of thousands of systems, and the loss of productivity while switching over, and... (I'm sure with a couple more minutes thought I could come up with five other angles of cost).
The summary makes it seem like they're holding on for sentiment, and that they're shooting themselves in the foot by sticking with tried and true software. The summary hasn't given any voice to the enormity of the task (it's not a simple "derr, click the upgrade button stupid"), nor the idea that this is government money which can and arguably should be used in more critical areas of life.
Are slashdot editors really this shortsighted?
I'm a web developer for an organisation that builds web based software that is primarily used by UK local government departments.
IE6 is my nemesis.
A lot of these local authorities are slowly starting to upgrade to Win7 platforms (just in time for Win8), but just like a chain being only as strong as it's weakest link, we have to ensure we are developing for the slowest common denominator.
From the dozens of conversations I've had with Council IT teams around the country, it isn't a lack of will or of motivation or of education, but of a real (and partially justified) fear that if they upgrade to Win7, some essential legacy web based application that works flawlessly in IE6 and XP, will fall over when introduced to IE8. This has happened at various places around the country and has cost Councils a pile of money to fix the issue or to replace those legacy systems. In the post recession cost-cutting world, no one wants to be the guy who lands their employer with a huge bill. I expect we wont see the stragglers taking up the challenge until austerity is done and dusted.
And there you have it. I managed to make this all the coalition government's fault. My work here is done.
In Germany most IE6 users also come from government institutions... I guess that with the general laziness of IT admins, we shouldn't be surprised that the ones working for the government are the laziest :)
The NSA still uses IE7 internally. Seriously, the NSA. These are the guys who are supposed to be on top of the information world.
To be fair, the standard system image also includes Firefox 10 (that's new as of just a few weeks ago, it was 3.6 prior to that), but most of the people I have to work with use IE7 anyway.
We still use IE6 in certain instances where I work (U.S. Gov't). It isn't part of a standard install, it is a published Citrix app and really only used for specific applications that require it. Our standard install is IE8 and Firefox 3.6.28.
The problem isn't the cost of upgrading workstations. It is there are a couple of critical web-interface apps that require it and are an expensive bitch to upgrade. Older versions of Oracle Financials for one.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Obviously sticking with IE6 is misguided, but I've seen the opposite side. I've worked in IT for 20+ years, and I've never seen any organization as cavalier about software upgrade costs as my provincial and federal governments. Entire departments would be upgraded to the latest version of Microsoft Office as soon as it came out. It had nothing to do with product features, or whether the previous version was sufficient for their needs. (And I'm not talking about file format changes, which caused a legitimate need for upgrading). The cost to taxpayers for unnecessary software upgrades must be be significant.
The culprit here isn't the desktops, it's the general, rock bottom, dire state of "enterprise" software.
Truth be told, shrink wrap software is way better put together than the overpriced, utter shite corporate web apps that many government and big corporate users are forced to endure. They are usually written by inexperienced or bored 9-to-5 developers, and get bit-rotten and unmaintainable fast and thus are sheer hell to work on or upgrade.
As a bored corporate drone myself, I feel the pain. I endure IE6 for using our business apps, and use Chrome for everything else.
According to the CFO and all the accountants who make IT decisions, who are not actually IT people, CNN, MSBNC, Yahoo, Cisco Client Connect, ADP, Bank of America, and every work related site works with IE 6. Their apps work with IE 6.
Why take risk and invest in something they already have that works fine?
If it doesn't increase the share price then why upgrade?
Electronic Imaging Systems, for MRI's and the like... still require the archaic IE6 ...
it seems idiotic programmers coded specifically for THAT browser and had no foresight...
then again medical hardware is meant to be replaced often so our healthcare costs can keep skyrocketing...
*end rant*
It's not that hard to make a web app that is future proof, as long as you write it to comply with the specs from W3C. I have developed a web app, so I know that not everything is specified unambiguously and not all browsers follow the spec to the letter, but it yields much better results than coding to one specific browser version.
In our web app, over a period of about 5 years, the only regression on a browser upgrade I can recall is that IE8 would misrender VML. The very use of VML was a forced deviation from the specs because IE7 and 8 didn't support SVG (and while there is a VML spec, IE doesn't follow it).
Back when these IE6-only applications were developed it was already clear that they would never run in non-Microsoft browsers. To me, that made it a bad idea, but many people didn't care or even realize that there were platforms other than Microsoft's. What people (me included) didn't realize though, is that even later IE versions would be incompatible with IE6.
Their customer support reps use it. Apparently they have an ActiveX widget that only works on ie6. Sucks to develop other web apps for their use.
Shouldn't name them, but if u are reading this please upgrade.
I have been a patient in two hospitals here in Regina Saskatchewan (Canada) the last couple of months and I've noticed all the desktops still run Windows XP (even with the screensaver saying proudly windows xp) and IE 6.... scares the hell out of me when hospitals are even running old software like that and what looks like some kind of application they use with username/passwords to access/modify patient records and whatever else etc.
A lot of people bitch about IE6 but the fact is it was a stable platform to build web apps to; There is no real equivalent even now - FF, Chrome, even Opera change the way things are done each major, and sometimes even minor, version bump which means it is very difficult to take advantage of the more niche or esoteric functions that claim to support.
IE6 is one of the longest running web browsers and that meant it was stable target for bespoke apps which government and corps often run a lot of. It sucked, yes, but that API (or whatever the correct term is) stability counts for a lot.
As a case in point, the web-based MIS that some schools here use was originally targeted at IE6 but as browser features evolved (JIT in particular), the schools demanded that Firefox was supported as it was two orders of magnitude faster. However, every time Firefox upgraded it would break something and the schools would end up going back to using IE6 for a few weeks to work around the broken parts until the problem could be identified and fixed by the MIS company.
The problem at the moment is that the HTML5 standards implementation is diverging - Firefox, Opera, IE8/9, Chrome, Safari etc. all do it slightly differently, enough so that you can't rely on anything but the most central parts of it. Hell, even well-featured HTML4 will render slightly differently in all the different browsers; I'm not even sure HTML3 would render similarly in different browsers.
It's a mess. Whereas before you just needed to target IE or Netscape (Ignoring us Opera users...) you now have a myriad of platforms. I thought we'd seen the last of the "Designed for Netscape/IE/Moomoomoo" labels but it seems they are coming back.
The sad and ironic thing is that Flash is the one stable platform common to all browsers right now...
It's because government IT staff is lazy, doesn't catch up with latest tech, as well directors doesn't see the need as well. They are just poor and low-class of our society running IE6, when everybody else migrated to iPads, Windows 7 and OS X.
Learning new things is just above them; face it, don't try to conceptualize it and make stories on the level of 5 year old lying kid.
You are running IE6 -> You are stupid like the least 5% of population. That's it. Don't try to explain it, it makes you look even dumber.
Upgrades are essential in supporting IT. If you don't do this, your support is a lie.
Everyone states things like "4% of internet traffic is still IE6. WHAT IDIOTS?!" Yeeeeah, that's me downloading drivers on a reinstall. It ships by default with XP so it won't be gone from server logs until after April 8th, 2014. Also, technically if a place was using Deep Freeze, it would be downgraded from moronic to unwise because security issues would be as critical.
I have to keep IE6 around because we have a ton of corporate apps that work on nothing but. I don't chalk that up to MS fault, but poor development. Transition should be interesting.