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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.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
New PC, old OS. Microsoft did a really good job locking people into IE. So good that many people still haven't escaped.
No sig today...
The "Social media guidance" document on which this is based is an interesting read: http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/social-media-guidance
They never buy NEW pc ?? Last time I installed some for my company I didnt had the choice, IE6 wasn't there...
FTFS:
Many UK government departments are still using IE6
Not all ... though even one is too many these days. Let's hope they don't have any IE 5 or old Netscape browsers hiding in unused bathrooms in the basement.
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.
Sure you can. Buy more than 100 seats of Windows 7 Pro, with Software Assurance, and self-downgrade before the initial install. Besides, most 100+ seat businesses use a custom OS image anyways. Easy enough to make it an XP Pro image, if you can find drivers for everything.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Dude, eleven isn't old.
I'm forty-four and I can't cope with social media either.
Dude, eleven isn't old. I'm forty-four and I can't cope with social media either.
If you were a web browser, you'd be featured in the Smithsonian, with maybe a small paragraph on Wikipedia on the history of web browsers, at best.
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.
Governments have a way of getting special deals that aren't available to people on the street.
No sig today...
This is pretty standard in the Microsoft volume licensing agreement. There's lots of corporations doing the exact same thing. How do you think XP hung around so long after it wasn't for sale anymore?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
As can the humongous retailers that are buying tens of thousands of licenses at a time...
And MS doesn't mind either because you buy 2 licences:
-The OEM version that comes with the new PC
-the Software Assurance version that bought extra.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Eleven is extremely old in Internet years.
/* No Comment */
It's a damned good racket, but it can be done. Just give enough money to MS, and they'll let you do anything you want.
Mind you, XP is solidly into security-patches-only support, and even that's drawing to a close, so I'd imagine the UK is looking into installing lots of firewalls over the next year or two, or they're even less intelligent than I gave them credit for.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
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'm not sure I'd qualify IE 6 as 11 years old . Sure it was released in 2001, but until October 2006, it was the only browser offering from Microsoft. So I think that I would almost like to say that it's less than 6 years old. That is, if you were in charge of IT at some company, and you had to standardize on a browser in January 2006, what would you have chosen? Chrome wasn't out.Firefox (1.0) had just been released a bit over a year before that. So a bunch of goverment departments haven't changed browsers in the last 5 years. So what. It's not that surprising.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The reasoning for this is they need to be certified for medical use. It takes *YEARS* to be certified. Once certified hospitals like to keep their investment around for a long time at least 5 years.
I upgrades a hospital last year and they just got certified to run IE 7! IE 8 was still being tested. Hospitals have many legacy devices that all send things like PDFs of xrays, lab reports, and other things accessible by IE and Exchange 2003. They do not integrate well with modern standards. Not to mention are very very expensive so why upgrade?
Biomedical equipment can't crash as lives would be at stake.
http://saveie6.com/
Shoot IE 8 just supported 1998 CSS 2.1 standards. The frustrating thing is all the other browsers are cutting edge now. IE 9 is ok, but that long lapse shouldn't be an excuse. Ms should be ostracized for it!
Imagine a world where we had to still support gcc 2.95 and VC++ 5, but it also had to compile in GCC 4.6 and VS 2010, and made sure all our code would compile flawlessly without error between those 2 versions? The changes in C++/C are huge with STL support and so on.
The whole point of switching to intranet apps was to avoid a nightmarish scenario like this. They were promised that it was write once, no need to deploy, anywhere forever. It turns out it is easy to upgrade legacy desktop apps then it is for intranet sites.
http://saveie6.com/
Firefox's distant relative, Netscape existed at the time, I remember using it back in 1999, so IE wasn't the only choice.
Even scarier: I visited a hospital recently where the desktops are still Windows 2000
Yikes, Netscape's CSS support made IE 6 look like a compliant saint.
Webmasters back then made sites that looked liked Craigslist and stuck with tables and HTML because Netscape blew so bad. I eventually switched to IE 6 in 2002 and couldn't believe the difference and how much better it was and faster. It sucked goatballs of course but back then what choice did you have? Netscape 4.7 came out in 1998 was already 4 years old! Just a minor improvement over Netscape 4.5 which came out in 1997.
By 2001 Netscape was becoming obsolete fast and was worse than IE 6 if you can believe anything was worse. It wasn't until Firefox that anything was even better.
http://saveie6.com/
Yeah, but looking at the usage history it wasn't very widely used in 2006. So, while it still existed, no competent IT person would have recommended it for company wide deployment. If you look at Usage data for Q1 2006, you'll see that IE is up around 90%. This is why IE 6 is still around. Because for a 5 year period after it's release, IE was used by more 85% of users.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In practical, brass-tack terms, IE6 should be considered completely unsupported at this point and a grave security risk if you use it to access the actual internet.
Using it for intranet-only stuff (presumably, because there's something proprietary in there that would cost a lot of money to upgrade or replace) does not present the same level of risk, provided you set it up so that IE6 can *only* access the intranet stuff, not the outside-world internet. (This can be done with judicious use of IE6's security zone policies.)
But this is mostly a big so-what, because It's not like IE6 is useful for browsing the internet these days anyway: fewer than half of the websites on the internet will render successfully, and that percentage is falling rapidly now, mostly due to the lack of any significant amount of CSS support. Some sites also run into problems with IE6 because of the way it handled XMLHttpRequest, which is slightly different from how modern browsers do it. Sites that care about supporting IE6 can easily work around that, though. (IE6 *has* XMLHttpRequest; it's just accessed slightly differently. A simple wrapper function that tries both makes the problem go away.) The lack of CSS support is the larger problem, as it takes a lot of effort to work around, and most web content developers stopped bothering when IE6 usage share fell below 1% a couple of years back.
Just for example, if IE6 is your only browser, you can forget about using any of Google's web-based services beyond the basic web search. YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Groups, you name it, they all don't work in browsers that old. Google is far from alone in this.
Ironicially, it's so painfully hard to keep more than one version of IE installed at once, that organizations that still need IE6 will necessarily find themselves using a different browser altogether for accessing the actual internet, which is presumably not exactly what Microsoft had in mind when they worked so hard to get companies locked in to IE6.
IE7 will not be far behind, I imagine. A couple more years, maybe. Currently my numbers say its usage share has already fallen below 5%, about _half_ of what it was one year previous. That's a very rough figure (based on usage of one site), but when you graph it over time the trend is absolutely impossible to miss: the IE6 share line is merging into the positive X axis, and the IE7 line looks like it's getting ready to follow. New version uptake for IE is faster than it used to be (probably due in large part to Automatic Updates being turned on by default since XP SP2). It still makes new version uptake for the webkit browsers look virtually instantaneous, mind you. But it's faster than it used to be.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
There is a huge difference between specifying the default browser for the desktop and specifying a web app should only work with that browser. One is a reasonable decision, the other shows a lack of vision.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'm not sure I'd qualify IE 6 as 11 years old . Sure it was released in 2001, but until October 2006, it was the only browser offering from Microsoft. So I think that I would almost like to say that it's less than 6 years old.
So, your 11-year-old child would only be five because she didn't have any siblings until six years ago? Good luck with that.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So, your 11-year-old child would only be five because she didn't have any siblings until six years ago? Good luck with that.
No, see, that's how it works with computer software; the date we're interested in isn't the date of introduction but the date of supersession. In this case that was only six years ago. Until, say, a year before that tops it didn't make sense to try to aim for IE7, and if you were committed to using a platform browser you were therefore targeting IE6. I was glad someone had figured out what year all this had happened because I didn't want to look it up.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They just put an old OS on. At the hospital I work at, there are a number of critical applications (like parts of electronic patient records, and other custom made apps) which only work on IE6.
That means the brand new workstations we took delivery of last month (dual quad core Xeons, 4 GB RAM, Fire GL Pro cards) have all been loaded with XP 32-bit SP1, in order to get IE6 and avoid some features of SP2 which break a number of other apps.
To be honest, it's a miracle that they're stable, as I can't believe the drivers for the graphics cards, etc. are fully supported on this OS.
So, your 11-year-old child would only be five because she didn't have any siblings until six years ago? Good luck with that.
No, see, that's how it works with computer software; the date we're interested in isn't the date of introduction but the date of supersession..
IE 5 for Mac had no successor -- does that make it brand new still?
This sig has exceed its monthly bandwidth allotment.
So, I guess it all boils down to the definition of superceded, because there were plenty of browsers around when IE6 was introduced: Netscape, Galeon, Opera, Konqueror to name a few. I guess for some it will never be superceded, because of the craptastic ineptitude of the website designers they hired to write their intranet portals.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The point is, that in 2006, IE had 90% market share. And even in 2008 it had close to 80% (Based on this data). So designing a web application that only worked in IE at the time could have been seen as a not-so-bad business decision, all things considered. Sure you could design something that worked in "all browsers" which at the time was just about nobody else. Why spend all that time testing on a browser that virtually nobody used. Also, remember the feature set wasn't as rich as it is now. If you wanted to do something like an AJAX call, you could do it using an ActiveX control, a Java applet, or possibly flash (I can't recall). But there was no native way to do that in the browser. A lot of internal applications were built with ActiveX, because it gave a very rich feature set, at a time when Javascript was a complete mess.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That is why I had my users on the Moz Suite back then followed by Seamonkey which a few use still. Even back in 06 one could see that most of the patches coming out were for IE 6 and the browser had a giant target painted on it.
That is one of the truly wonderful things about today in that there is plenty of choices out there. Today I give my customers a choice of Comodo Dragon (Chromium based without the phone home), Pale Moon (an offshoot of Firefox that isn't gonna use the metro UI, great for those that prefer the Fox), for older machines Kmeleon CCF Me or QTWeb, both of which are VERY fast even on older hardware. If anyone is tired of their browser they should give one of the above a try, they all have their advantages.
I'm just glad i'm not doing corporate anymore because it must truly suck ass to have to support IE 6 in this day and age.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You don't need Software assurance. New PCs sold with Windows 7 Pro licenses (eg the laptops and workstations businesses buy) come with Downgrade rights to WindowsXP pro.
These businesses already have their XP Pro VL key and image, and are allowed to use it to reimage these new PCs to XP. You don't NEED a VL copy, you can use other versions, but activation becomes a PITA in a hurry.
I should mention you can do this reimaging without any additional charge. The Windows7 Pro OEM that came with the machine is the only incremental amount you give MS.
That's true, I was mainly thinking of purchasing managers who will totally sign off on a huge package of SA Windows licenses because it makes audits simple, but then buy all the machines with Windows 7 Super-Cripple edition or the NoOS option. If you're careful to only buy Win7 Pro, you can downgrade from right there, no other purchases involved.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
So, I guess it all boils down to the definition of superceded, because there were plenty of browsers around when IE6 was introduced: Netscape, Galeon, Opera, Konqueror
Many organizations were cowed into depending on a Microsoft-only platform, so none of the alternatives really applied for them, and since that accounts for shitloads of seats and users today, they are highly relevant. If you were drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid you were anti-Netscape, and none of those alternatives were really credible alternatives at the time. These days, Webkit and Opera are both highly credible, I'm not trying to badmouth anything, but back then realistically it was between Nutscrape and Aieeee! And frankly, there were plenty of reasons to complain about both browsers — which in both cases have, I feel, been pretty much completely replaced with new things to complain about :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Ok, but what of that has anything to do with the definition of how old something is?
The last time something was shipped when its successor was not available a download away is its age. Check out how old Windows XP is by this definition (shipped on many small systems until very recently) and be agog.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"