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."
chrome frame (Score:2, Interesting)
Old Standards Never Die (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of this old story of how the design of the Space Shuttle was influenced by the width of a horses butt [astrodigital.org]
Re:You Can't Pry IE6 from the Poor, M$ Addicts (Score:3, Interesting)
Afterwards the pieces of M$ should be given to the free software movements so interoperability can be acheived.
I know you're trolling, but that's the problem. You want everyone to switch to linux, and then you expect interoperability to be developed. It's not going to happen. The interoperability must come first, and then and ONLY then will linux even be considered for anything more than running the servers.\
Linux is like the DVORAK keyboard - apparently it was/is faster and apparently the layout was more "well thought out" than QWERTY. However you can't expect the whole world to suddenly switch unless there is a clear decisive advantage to investing hours of training and downtime to transition to the new standard. Dvorak is only "marginally" better than QWERTY - and even that small margin in speed is disputed, so it ends up being just not worth the up front cost of switching and retraining.
The same for linux. Yes it has come far. Yes ubuntu can be run by just about anyone. Yes there are similar apps available in linux. However by design, by omission and due to copyright/patent laws, they are different enough to require substantial investments in switching. Also very few of them have ALL the features available in current Windows software. And big business is showing you that even at X hundred dollars/product cycle, Microsoft products (and products designed only for Windows) are still "cheaper". It's not enough to "clone" current Windows software in linux. Something has to be made that is CLEARLY BETTER. Until then linux will remain the toy OS for nerds, or the stable OS quietly running things in the background invisible to Joe Average.
Re:Nah.. still all comes down to "idiocy" (Score:3, Interesting)
Many users are too stupid to deal with two.
Easily remedied -- again, configure IE6 to not be able to access the Internet, and provide a splash screen every time they try explaining how to get there. Also, place a link on their desktop to their internal app -- if you're good, configure it so the IE it opens doesn't have an address bar.
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.
I doubt it. All it takes is one user who figures it out and publishes a blog post. Then a few other users -- again, it only takes a small number, say one per department -- find said blog post. Before you know it, everyone's doing it.
Put another way, you'd think users are too stupid to pirate things on their own, but all it takes is one person to figure out how to burn a Photoshop CD and defeat the DRM. After that, even if it's a slight inconvenience, they'll do it, because it saves them hundreds of dollars.
Either way, blocking YouTube by blocking IE6 is about the least effective, most headache-prone way to block these things. Don't they have corporate firewalls they could use for this? And any user smart enough to use a proxy is also smart enough to use a portable Firefox.
IE6 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess in general ? No. In the company I work in? Hell, no.
1. The manager is the owner. My disagreement from 2001, the reasons for it, and the suggested alternative are in his inbox.
2. It's been serving us faithfully for nearly nine years. No one gets fired for having engineered something like that.
3. It's trivial to run an emulator with the sole purpose to access our point of sale front end to ANOTHER obsolete app.
4. Rewriting the four sites that will not work with newer versions is not impossible, or that costly. Just unnecessary.
5. In the world of private ownership, department heads don't fire get fired for mistakes in the past, but for failure to handle the present.
7. No one got fired for buying IBM^H^H^H Microsoft.
IE6 compatability is *not* a valid excuse (Score:3, Interesting)
The company I work for creates web based software used by large (by UK standards) banks and I can tell you that the vast majority of their userbase is stuck on IE6. The usual reason for this is compatability with old apps, and IE6 is not as backwards as they get - one of the mortgage processing/calculating apps used when I was sorting the paperwork for my flat was DOS based.
But compatability is *not* a valid excuse for not installing something newer. It *is* a reason for not installing IE8 (you can't run IE8 and IE6 on the same machine without virtualisation of some completely unsupported hack), but it doesn't stop them putting on Firefox/Chrome/Opera/... alongside IE6 and just letting IE6 live for as long as the older apps live (which may be some time given my witnessing of a DOS based app in business-as-usual use two-ana-half years ago).
They will not upgrade from "IE6 and only IE6" until the cost of doing so (design/testing/roll-out of new desktop builds, extra support time needed because if they go for the two browser stop-gap it will confuse many of their should-sacked-from-jobs-that-are-well-documented-to-require-computer-competence-for-not-being-able-understanding-such-things staff, paying for old software to be fixed/upgraded, and so on) is outweighed by the cost of staying where they are (those costs basically amounting to not being able to use certain software/sites (but they are big enough that saying "we'll consider your app if you support IE6" neatly sorts that) and looking like neanderthals (but the general public will never know and is doesn't really matter to them what us techies-in-the-know think)).
Re:This is news? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, on our 66mhz computers with 80mb hard drives.
Re:Agreed (Score:2, Interesting)
LedgerSMB: [ledgersmb.org] Open source accounting and E
Open source? Accounting? Narcotics? ... is this legal?
They have IE6 apps, you see it everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Many custom corporate apps built between 2002-2006 were called "Web apps" but were really "IE6 apps". In the late 90's they would have been Windows apps built with Visual Basic. Companies thought they were modernizing to the Web but really just got a different kind of Windows app.
It continues with IE7 and IE8 ... these browsers are so incapable that, for example, a rich text editor for them is done as ActiveX instead of as HTML5, so you can't run the app anywhere but IE. Now that these companies are often running multiple platforms (Windows XP, Windows Vista/7, Mac OS, iPhone, Blackberry) they are getting bitten on the ass. It's like Y2K in that the future was never supposed to happen.
Microsoft succeeded in forking the Web. This is the aftermath. That's why HTML5 compatibility is so important, the focus on browser vendors in the spec means that Apple WebKit and Mozilla Gecko engineers do a lot of work to make their browsers compatible with each other. You have WebKit redoing canvas in the standard way, redoing Gears in the standard way. If you're locked into any one browser or one hardware that is not the Web, it is by definition only what's completely universal. If it's not universal (IE, Flash) it's not part of the Web.
Re:Chained to IE6 (Score:3, Interesting)
Like it or not, for big IT, these are must haves:
Let me just say, I agree that third-party browsers need to support group policies before big businesses will take them seriously but if the business depends upon...
Ability to specify proxy servers and prevent users from modifying them?
to guarantee people only get on the web using the Approved Method, they're Doing It Wrong.
Re:Chained to IE6 (Score:3, Interesting)
There you go, if for some reason a new version of IE is out of the question then there is a MSI version of Firefox that allows you to deploy across numerous computers and use group policies.
Re:Chained to IE6 (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? Do you have some Java program that would run in 1.4 that won't run in 1.6? I certainly have never run into any.
convenience (Score:1, Interesting)
Subordinating your business interests to the business interests of your vendor seems like a pretty stupid move, and one that should have consequences.
No, it was not completely "stupid", just very convenient to use these technologies--at least in the short term.
Jon Udell once remarked (ages ago) that Windows gets you from 0-60 quicker than Unix, but you need need Unix to get from 60-100 (at least at the time, mid-1990s). Some people only need to get to 60 (or less) and then just move onto other things without considering things more closely.
Windows 98 (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't underestimate the impact of Windows 95/98. It still runs on old hardware, is compatible-enough it can still run most applications businesses need, etc. IE6 is the newest browser available.
If anyone has any suggestion for a full-featured browser that still runs on Windows 98, I could probably reduce the count of IE6 users by a few thousand. Don't bother mentioning Firefox. Mozilla.org gave-up Windows 9x compatibility with v3, so you're still left with an unsupported browser. That "EX"-something-or-other (to run XP apps on 9x) sounds clever, but is an overwhelming no-go in a business.
And suggesting hardware upgrades for everyone, when their needs are absolutely trivial, and already met, will similarly get met with extreme resistance in the "more frugal" (read: cheap as hell) organizations, such as mine.
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess you really haven't done any development using IIS. You should look at the browsercap.ini file in IIS. As delivered by Microsoft, it treated Firefox as a very inferior browser compared to IE. You had to perform some serious hacking to this file in order to bring up the capablities to something reasonable. And even then IIS didn't treat Firefox the same. Let's face it, using IIS basically forced IE on the client. Plain and simple.
Re:Nah.. still all comes down to "idiocy" (Score:1, Interesting)
"Old hardware can run Firefox just fine" but it will be dog slow, unresponsive, and make it nigh impossible to do anything else with the machine. I had it installed to test webpage compatibility but I stuck to IE6 until Chrome came out. From what I've heard IE7 and 8 are resource hungry, and to be fair, Chrome isn't a perfect replacement. Sure, you can use SRWare Iron if you don't like privacy aspects, but if you don't like the tabs, well tough luck, you can't disable those. And if you install it, the first thing you will see is an ugly mixture of XP's default Fisher Price interface and Vista. If the user is using a different colour setting, they will see it clash and unless they're savvy enough to know how to patch the theme dll (the official theme format doesn't allow to get rid of the Vista buttons and ugly toolbar buttons - besides there aren't that many themes, so good luck finding something that harmonises with your set-up) they will probably go back to IE6 after seeing it just once. I almost did.