Why You Can't Pry IE6 Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands 416
Esther Schindler writes "It's easy for techies to enumerate the reasons that Internet Explorer 6 should die. Although the percentage of users who use IE6 has dropped to about 12%, many web developers are forced to make sure their websites work with the ancient browser (which presents additional problems, such as keeping their companies from upgrading to newer versions of Windows). But rather than indulge in an emotional rant, in 'Why You Can't Pry IE6 Out Of Their Cold Dead Hands,' I set about to find out why the companies that remain standardized on IE6 haven't upgraded (never mind to what). In short: user and business-owner ignorance and/or disinterest in new technology; being stuck with a critical business app that relies on IE6; finding a budget to update internal IE6 apps that will work the same as they used to; and keeping users away from newer Web 2.0 sites."
This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a secret that lock-in was why IIS and IE were designed to complement each other. The objective was to kill Netscape and Java by any means necessary. Active-X was a tool to this end.
And now we see the same tools who bought these chains exchanging them for IE8 and Sharepoint when they can. Because that won't be hard to get rid of.
Misleading but Common (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they are not. They might want to, but they're not FORCED to do this. This means they are part of the problem, because if IE6 didn't work with most sites it would provide another reason to make the free upgrade.
Nah.. still all comes down to "idiocy" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but having RTFA, I still can come back to just one reason for still using IE6: Ignorance.
Okay, so there's companies that have IE6-only apps. That's no reason to not upgrade: Nobody forces you to have only one browser. Even if you don't want to have IE6 and Firefox, you can have two versions of IE itself installed. You can set up the hideously-insecure IE6 to only be able to access the company intranet where you need it, and use IE7 or 8 for the rest of the world where having a more-modern, more-secure browser is useful.
Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here [tredosoft.com] or here [my-debugbar.com]
Old hardware can run Firefox just fine - I used Portable Firefox for years when I was working for an IE-only company. You don't have to use the browser your company installs on your machine if you don't want to.
And as for IE6 keeping people away from sites like YouTube.. I'm not even going to dignify that with a refutation. Anyone who wants to get around that problem could do so without the slightest difficulty in the space of about ten minutes. This sounds more like a fairy story from the IT depertments to clueless PHB's: "Don't worry, boss, we don't need to block YouTube, it doesn't work with our browser. Not get out of my cubicle so I can watch the latest Foamy the Squirrel video, wouldya?"
IE6 still exists because Microsoft wanted it too (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft designed IE6 with all sorts of cool interfaces for corporate developers. They then unleashed a wave of evangelists to encourage people to exploit those non-standard extensions, and encourage them to exploit the non-standard quirks. It was a deliberate strategy to gain and hold market share.
It worked. IE6 is unstoppable, even by Microsoft.
Re:Nah.. still all comes down to "idiocy" (Score:3, Insightful)
> Nobody forces you to have only one browser.
Many users are too stupid to deal with two.
> Anyone who wants to get around that problem could do so without the
> slightest difficulty in the space of about ten minutes.
Most users are too stupid to deal with that. The rest are smarter than the admins and are going to do whatever they want.
Speaking as (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm the husband of a senior exec in a Fortune 500 company which will remain nameless (but you use their products every day anywhere in the world - it's a big one) I have noticed that they still use Windows XP and IE 6. Although my better half isn't in the IT department I have made this observation to her and the apparent reason is that IT is "waiting" to upgrade to Windows 7 (ie, they skipped Vista entirely) and they plan on doing "all the upgrades at the same time". The internet browser is not the key feature for their staff anyway (what really gets used is office and outlook 2007 plus a custom "IM" program). In fact, large chunks of the internet are blacklisted by the IT department. You just can't get there from the company VPN which is the only way to connect on the "company laptop" (good thing they don't know about "Ubuntu" so my wife and I can skype each other when she travels).
My understand is that it's not "ignorance" that is holding back the switch - rather the economic problems set back upgrades of company hardware that were planned for last year and have been pushed forwards to 2011 and the tech boys decided that if they're going to upgrade they'll do everything at once, including the browser.
Take the hardline approach... (Score:2, Insightful)
... and just start BLOCKING IT.
A lot of companies get themselves into a nice little rut where they will refuse to budge, unless their security / profits are affected. Give them a helping hand by forcing them to drop IE 6. After a while, the number of websites that will be throwing up road blocks in their faces will force them to upgrade.
Or migrate to Firefox, which would probably be better.
If you administer an Apache server, it's more-or-less as easy as,
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MSIE\ ([56])\. /denied.php [R=302,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/denied.php$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$
Okay, I realise it's often more complicated than that, since they need to test / upgrade from WinXP, etc., there are costs and man power involved, but unless webmasters act on this, we could still be asking people to upgrade IE6 in 2015. Yes, even 9 months after official support ends on XP.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired? Subordinating your business interests to the business interests of your vendor seems like a pretty stupid move, and one that should have consequences.
Why expect companies to "upgrade"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should businesses keep "upgrading"? Really, Microsoft's OS hasn't changed much in the last decade. Almost everything runs under Windows 2000. Even ".NET" and Direct-X applications tend to work, and all the major open-source applications do. Why pay Microsoft more money? Most of this "upgrading" is planned obsolescence, not progress.
It was different in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Microsoft went from Windows 3.0/DOS, which was awful, to Windows 2000, which was a good OS. Desktop computing made great strides in the 1990s. But by 2000, the problems were solved. In Windows 2000, networking worked, 3D graphics worked, and the system was stable after the first service packs. For most businesses, that was good enough.
In the last decade, Microsoft went through Windows 2000, XP (which was really to pull the Win 95/98/ME crowd onto a decent platform), Vista (enough said), and now Windows 7 (the new, improved Vista.) At the end of this, we have an OS which offers essentially the same API as ten years ago. Not much has really changed.
Most commercial and open source applications work on Windows 2000, and almost all work on Windows XP. Load up the latest Firefox, and all the "Web 2.0" stuff works on Windows 2000. If you don't get too cute with tricky HTML and Javascript, the same code works on IE6 and later browsers.
Worse, Microsoft's newer OSs are oinkers. They need more CPU and more RAM to do the same thing. They phone home to Redmond constantly. They have activation problems. They're constantly getting updates, some of which make things worse. Why should companies pay for this? Where's the return on investment?
Re:Chained to IE6 (Score:3, Insightful)
You could install multiple versions of IE. You could install any other browser and use that instead of IE6 where you can. You could run IE6 in a VM.
You're only "chained" because you don't care.
Must be compatible with IE6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they are. If you work for a company with more than 10,000 employees (as I do), and if the company's standard browser (deployed and supported by Desktop services) is IE6 (as it is with us), and they pay you to develop a new internal web application (to go along with the 20 others that are already in use and designed for IE6 only) - well... you make it work with IE6 or you find a new job.
Re:Chained to IE6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it did; the native Win32 app. IMHO most of the ActiveX-reliant applications of that day would have been better off written that way anyway. It would have been more portable because it never would have tied them to any particular browser version, and it would have been more usable, too.
Re:When should FOSS projects stop supporting IE6? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
No - because the current server/client combination works just fine thank you - as far as they are concerned. That's one of the points made in the article.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it's just fine, unless you want to move to a different server OS, or a different client OS, or a even a newer version of the *same* client OS. In other words, you've completely removed the ability for IT to make any strategic or tactical decisions. All of these problems could have been avoided with a cross-platform solution, either open source or proprietary. These alternatives did exist, and some companies used them and avoided such lock-in.
Re:"Well, it still works....why should I upgrade?" (Score:3, Insightful)
They'll figure it out as sites start rendering incorrectly
No, they'll use a competitor's site that does support IE 6. My employer tried adding a pop-up to warn customers using IE 6 about the deficiencies of IE 6, but that resulted in a bunch of angry e-mails landing in my box, and it was gone the next day.
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
probably not a web facing server, and maybe work stations set up to border on dumb terminals.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
***What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired?***
I would imagine that in many cases, their question would be why YOU are still employed. They have computers. The computers do what is needed. They perceive that the IT industry -- much like American car manufacturers in the 1970s -- is creating expensive and poorly crafted junk that is little, if any, better than what they have. Change for the sake of change.
And they might be right. Refusal to engage in a Red Queen's Race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race) is not necessarily a sign of cluelessness. You might want to meditate during leisure moments about who here is actually clueless.
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)
IT departments did not generally want Windows either. That would mean replacing their nice mainframes etc with uncontrolled PCs. The idea of allowing any end user physical access to even these "toy computers" was actually popular with senior management because it put power into their hands and took it away from people they didn't understand or like.
Those managers have gone on and some will have moved much further up. I have met some who still see that move to Windows as a liberation. They see any move from certain things as a move back to the Bad Old Days!
Do not blame the IT from then. It wasn't their idea. Some were for it - some weren't. The managers were seen by MS as the way in as IT departments were not cooperative. It was just a seriously good business strategy by MS to promote themselves to the people at the top, rather than to those who actually recognised them for what they were!
But they did put a computer on every desk. It is now up to us to get those computers working right...
Re:Chained to IE6 (Score:3, Insightful)
If the business wants to do business using illegal means, the corporate lawyers are going to stop it. Firing them is dangerous in the extreme and can lead to largish prison sentences.
If the business wants to rent officespace in a condemned building, it's a given that someone will knock some sense in the head of management.
If the business wants to sell dangerous or illegal goods, someone from the quality check department should put on the brakes.
If the business wants to use a dangerous and in the long run, very expensive, tool to conduct business, the relevant department should stop it.
If the business wants to use a dangerous and in the long run, very expensive, IT-tool to conduct business, the IT-department should stop it.
A business where the line managers run roughshod over the relevant departments in order to get their bonus in the short term is a business that's not going for the long haul. Make sure you are prepared to abandon ship when the managers do likewise, and make sure that questionable decisions are confirmed in writing or e-mail, and copy them to a folder at your home.
Re:Chained to IE6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Had people opted for open formats and open standards then it wouldn't be as much of an issue. I have no pity for companies that have their data locked behind some outdated awful MS solution. I hope it hurts their pocket book big time when they're forced to move on.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
unless you want to move to a different server OS, or a different client OS, or a even a newer version of the *same* client OS.
They do not want to move to a different server OS, or client OS, or a newer version of the same client OS. That's the whole point.
You should really try working for a business that needs to actually, you know, turn a profit instead of upgrading to every shiny new system as they come out.
What an IT manager wants and what is practical is often not the same thing, and a good IT manager will develop the trust needed to steer the company toward the products and upgrades they truly need. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't bother to hire good IT managers, often outsourcing it to people who could care less, and you get stuck in situations where a company spent $10 million on a web app that only works in IE6 a year before IE7 was released. You can bet your ass that company is going to want to get more than a few years out of their $10 million investment. Ergo, no upgrade.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they really don't want to change often, and use things for a very long time, then choosing proprietary software is probably the worst choice. What do you do when support is dropped and you have a critical bug or security hole? In that case, open source is a much better option, since you can run it forever, and if you absolutely need to fix something you can.
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
And I was using a 244MHZ PII box well into 2007. My computer of course was not typical of computers those days, and makers of modern software did not take my machine into consideration. Saying that ActiveX was a more viable technology then native applications in 1996 because your personal computer happened to be quite old doesn't really make much sense to me.
Re:Speaking as (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me guess... next you want me to hit you as hard as I can?
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, like people installing IE6.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Java was an incredibly poor performing option on the computers in the 1998-2001 timeframe though. ActiveX allowed for windows natively executing code within the browser. Though a poor solution for the most part, especially compared to native apps, since ax needed to be registered/installed anyhow. Java wasn't performant enough, and Flash wasn't yet a viable option. On release IE6 was the best browser available. That's changed, and not been the case for several years now, but I think people look back a decade ago with some skewed perspectives.
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired? Subordinating your business interests to the business interests of your vendor seems like a pretty stupid move, and one that should have consequences.
Clearly you're not a web developer or haven't been one for around ten years. There was a several year period (between when Netscape turned to utter shit and the rise of Firefox) where IE was the only reasonable choice for a graphical free (as in beer) web browser.
It doesn't take an idiot to make an app that only works in one browser when there only is one browser.
Re:Chained to IE6 (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed, if workstations aren't allowed to access the internet directly, but only through a single proxy with authentication, it doesn't matter if a user can change the setting, it won't work if not configured correctly.
Re:This is news? (Score:1, Insightful)
But who would want to move away from Windows? It's reasonably stable, easy to use, there's plenty of people available to manage it and it's been the mainstay of business for 20 years. And Microsoft really does mostly provide pretty good backwards compatibility (even if the solution is nasty).
The companies that used the alternatives are in the minority and what competitive advantage has it given them?
There's a big difference between a technical decision and a business decision.
Every client is a potential proxy server (Score:3, Insightful)
In a world where rootkits and malware infest nearly half [zdnet.com] of Windows desktops and deliver a tranparent proxy with encrypted tunnels into your precious LAN, all servers are web facing servers. The security of the firewall is a myth serious professionals no longer subscribe to, and many never did. Secure your intranet server and your desktops as if they were in your DMZ because for all practical purposes that's where they are.
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
On release IE6 was the best browser available.
Except that it was a trap from day one. Every serious IT pro knew it was a trap. There was no attempt made to disguise this trap: Microsoft made it quite clear that they were competing for control of the Web and they considered it an issue of corporate survival - which it was and is. They were and are completely open about the fact that they're integrating these things and interfering with open integration for the direct purpose of promoting their technologies and brands. Like I said in that first post, it's not a secret at all.
That makes it hard to weep for those who invested and still invest their own money, time and intellectual ability to skill up on these technologies and so chain themselves to the oars of Microsoft's galley, doomed to row for the benefit of a corporation that prides itself on fooling others into rowing their boat to their own detriment.
Re:It's not all about you (Score:2, Insightful)
> why did Microsoft abandon it?
Did you SLEEP through the late nineties?
Microsoft very reluctantly abandoned ActiveX, after years of dragging their feet, only when it had long since become absolutely crystal clear that their sole other option was to claim, with a straight face, that when it comes to connecting your corporate assets to the internet, security totally doesn't matter at all. Even then they would have opted for that, if they could have come up with any kind of plan for making people believe it.
I'm not sure ActiveX was created for the purpose of generating lock-in. Perhaps they had something else in mind originally.
But I *am* reasonably sure that after it was created, Microsoft liked the fact that it created lock-in.
And EVERYONE in the industry saw how reluctant they were to abandon it, and how long it took them to finally give up and do so after every single security professional in the entire IT industry had written (often quite vehemently) about how grossly horribly irresponsible its design was.
Re:Old Standards Never Die (Score:2, Insightful)