Corporate IT Just Won't Let IE6 Die 479
alphadogg writes "Security experts, industry analysts, and even Microsoft recommend that IT departments upgrade Internet Explorer 6, yet new research shows that while there may have recently been a mock funeral for the aging browser, IE6 is still around and doing well, especially during standard business hours." The article says that they are seeing 6-13% peaking during business hours. Around here we see less than 1.5% IE6, but since we see only 10% IE in general, I imagine we're just lucky.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
but I'm working on it! The only way to get Corporate/Management off of IE6 is to fix any web apps you have in your organization that won't work on anything but that.
At the same time, more and more important sites out there need to stop supporting IE6. Where I work now, we are forced to use IE6 because it is "company standard", but it is accepted, at the same time, that we need to look up stuff on external web sites all the time. If those sites no longer support our browser, that would be an increasingly urgent reason to upgrade.
Once that decision is taken, it would probably only take between 4 and 6 years to actually get the project implemented...
like IT has a choice (Score:2, Insightful)
Most IT departments have their hands tied for a majority of their projects. Be it, homegrown app compatibility, budget, balancing higher priority projects, upper management or what have you. I'm not surprised by this at all. Just because a piece of software is "retired" doesn't mean everything that relies on it is. IE6 is not going away completely for a LONG time.
Re:Legacy apps (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, the millions of dollars excuse again. You can keep IE6 for accessing internal applications, just deploy a modern browser for using the web and b2b web applications. It can't cost more to support than the cost of cleaning up a malware'd network. If it costs millions of company dollars to install and maintain a web browser, that is incompetence.
Re:As a general rule (Score:5, Insightful)
Go poke the CIO instead. That's where the buck stops.
An IT department can make all the technical cases it want to. However, until the equation of $$$StandStill is less than $$$Moveforward, $$$StandStill is where you'll be.
And no, the CIO is almost never a technical weenie. It's just another seat on the board, with fat shareholder priviledges.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's equivalent to saying "We need to run mission-critical software that won't run on higher versions of IE."
I've actually had to go around uninstalling IE 7 and 8 from user machines and re-installing IE 6 because the users have to run IE6-only software, or the vendor's IE7 installer doesn't work, or there are bugs in the IE 7 version, etc. etc. Sure, I'd love to get rid of the vendor -- you think that's easy?
Of course, I also encourage people to do any *ahem* personal browsing in Firefox anyway, but IE6 isn't going to go away until we don't need it. If the web-designer artistes out there want to complain about cross-browser compatibility, they can either bite me, or come down and do my users' jobs for them.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's because of familiarity, I'm pretty sure. I've had clients absolutely refuse to use anything else, even IE8, because it "felt" (in other words, looked) different from what they were used to. My solution to this is usually one of the Firefox themes that makes Firefox look like IE. The IE6 one is pretty flawless.
If a client cares about that more than all of the problems with IE6, then they should not have a position in their company that allows them to make IT-related decisions.
Re:Legacy apps (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize this probably wasn't your fault in the first place, but it *is* your company's own fault. Eventually, Microsoft *will* stop supporting IE6 (XP is supposed to go out of support in a few years, and there's no IE6 for Vista or 7). Those millions of dollars *will* have to be spent. Why not start working on it now and spread the pain out. All of this "but it will cost us million of dollars to make our stuff work like it should have in the first place!" whinging by various corporate managers kind of ridiculous. You (not you personally, but generically "you IT managers") know they won't support this stuff forever, you could fix this over time and spend very little quarter by quarter, but you'd rather cry about the million of dollars it will cost all at once when you eventually HAVE to deal with it.
Re:Yeah, we're one of the ones stuck with it (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't understand why you just don't treat IE6 as a specialized internal apps platform and use something else, like Firefox, as a web browser.
Developers could then code new apps to modern standards and those apps could use Firefox as the apps platform.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're grossly mis-underestimating the size of the organizations which are still mandating IE 6 as a corporate standard.
For instance, the government of Canada, I believe, still uses IE 6 as a standard -- that represents something like 200,000+ users.
The scope of the project to re-certify that much software isn't a small consulting team, and it's sure as hell not a "Rent-A-Coder" fix as suggested in a sibling post. You're talking about vast quantities of commercial software which are already deployed to a large user base.
The problem becomes that IE 6 is deeply entrenched, and involved in a lot of tasks organizations aren't really willing to have too much down-time with. So, the status quo tends to become a factor.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:1, Insightful)
no, no and no.
you fix firefox so that ACTIVEX and shit like that WORKS!!!
i (and probably everyone else) cannot 'fix' the builtin web interface in (expensive) hardware
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
You Can't Kill What's Required (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, not all the people using IE6 are customers trying to access shopping sites.
The non-profit I work receives a pile of grant money from several state and local governments, and because of this, we are required to submit grant activity data back to the sources. Guess which browser their reporting sites demand?
One of the state agencies actually has a couple of sites that we're required to use, and both are developed on the same floor in the same building by two guys who sit less than twelve feet apart. One guy's site will run run in IE8 and Firefox without problems, the other guy's will only run in IE6.
Re:Yeah, we're one of the ones stuck with it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We scare our customers who run IE 6 & 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that's a good idea. You should post your infected image code, I'm sure people would love to do the same thing internally.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are you browsing from a VM like that anyway?
If those machines exist so you can test your products in antiquated browsers, don't use them for anything else...
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes! It simply doesn't meaneverything.
A perfectly secure system that doesn't do anything is useless. But an insecure system that malfunctions and loses $5 with a 50% chance time you press a button is still worth using if it earns $11 when it doesn't malfunction.
There's a cost/benefit analysis going on. For a lot of businesses, even with the insecurities and incompatibilities, the result of that cost/benefit analysis is "keep running IE6". The solution really is to take those business functions that only work on IE6 and update them so they work with newer browsers... as long as the cost savings of moving to a newer browser exceeds the cost of that mitigation effort.
When it doesn't, you end up deciding to keep running IE6. On purpose. Without being wrong.
Re:Yeah, we're one of the ones stuck with it (Score:5, Insightful)
I just HOPE that in the future, development teams will fucking stick to standards!
Microsoft sold senior management on a series of rapid application development tools that allowed developers to write very effective applications very quickly. Rational companies use the most effective tool to solve a business problem, and in a lot of heavy-Microsoft shops those tools were FrontPage, SQL Server, Visual(insert language here), and the rest of the Microsoft development suite that was almost free once you drank the whole glass of kool-aid, Cherry Redmond flavor.
I don't think in all fairness that anyone could have predicted that Microsoft would not only break compatibility with other browsers, but also break compatibility with their own. The fact remains that a lot of software written with Microsoft toolkits from the IE6 era will only run on IE6. There is no IE6 compatibility mode in any meaningful sense of the term, and there is no "take the source code, shove it into this tool, recompile, now you're IE7+ compatible!" magic bullet, even when you have the original source code and the latest Microsoft tools. It requires recoding. Long, tedious, manual recoding.
As far as external vendor software goes, hell, "follows Web standards" isn't even on the RFP checklist at many companies now, and it certainly wasn't back then. The "standard" was Microsoft, because that's what everyone ran. If you could write your software more cheaply by using an ActiveX widget, so be it. That's what you did. And Microsoft will always support this stuff, because that's what they do, right?
The business shops around for the software that best solves the problem they have at the lowest price they can get away with. IT might get involved to make sure it works with the back-end systems, but very few people care too deeply about the desktop.
Tons and tons of companies used those tools to write applications for their internal use and also for sale to other companies. Then Microsoft came out with IE7 and basically told all of those developers that their applications would need to be almost completely rewritten.
Development teams will fucking stick to standards, but they are the standards of the company they work for, and last I checked IEEE doesn't run most companies unless I missed the global memo about the planetary business reorganization.
I'm just glad I never got into desktop application development. Writing useful programming is a whole lot easier on the midrange field, because my apps run on a single box, and I don't give a rat's ass what version of telnet you use to access my apps as long as it supports the 5250 function keys. I'm free to think about functionality, performance, security, and stability. I don't deal with desktop compatibility and what shade of cerulean the "Accept" button needs to be.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's mostly due to the relationship between the IT staff and the regular employees. In some situations, IT can dictate quite a bit and is left to make their own decisions about security, but in most situations they are essentially the servants of the employees - someone to clean malware off of their computers and be whined at. If the employee(s) doesn't/don't want IE6, then it's harder for IT to make a case to management (since they could otherwise claim that the employees also want an upgrade) to justify upgrading, and most just won't bother unless there's lots of user demand. If the users are against it, it takes either a somewhat reckless IT dept. or a tech-savvy manager to realize that this stuff needs to get done.
A hypothetical: if my doctor told me that there was a very good medical reason for me to do something, I would follow his advice. I guess you could say that doing what he tells me I should do makes me a "servant" except that he doesn't have a way to force me to do anything. I can realize on my own that it's in my interests to follow the advice he gives me and that I probably don't have the expertise it would take to seriously dispute him.
Or I could ignore my doctor's hypothetical advice. Since I am paying/hiring him, I can think of him as my "servant" and insist that he never tell me anything I don't want to hear, especially those things that would suggest I should change my lifestyle or otherwise adapt to something new. I can freely ignore any such advice and take the attitude of "what does he care, he got paid." I could do that, but ignoring the sound advice of an expert in his field who is trying to look out for you is generally unwise.
On the one hand, if you expect users to understand and be able to follow basic procedures without making silly errors they tell you things like "but I'm not a computer expert, I just want it to work!" On the other hand, when you present them with a real computer expert they will ignore his advice the second it means they might lose a pretty icon or a shiny button. So they are like my second hypothetical situation. They neither wish to become experts nor listen to existing experts.
Name one other profession or trade or area of expertise where expert advice is so routinely ignored for such trivial reasons. It doesn't happen with doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics or insurance agents. "If the users are against it" their ability to understand the full implications of their decision and their background in IT should be considered first and foremost. If not, why don't we have such "mob rule" in all the other departments of major corporations? I'm sure most users would like a $300k/yr raise too, so does that mean Accounting is obligated to accommodate them?
Re:a lot of old software requires IE6 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Before it's said, so what if IE6 doesn't work on the web anymore? Either sandbox everything or keep IE6 for internal webapps alone, prevent it from ever going wan, and just give the diligent users another browser for surfing the web or youtube during the other 6 hours of their work day. Build in the systems breaking as part of the maintenance cycle... and with a lot of hands doing the same well documented things to keep it going, you have a system that can stand the 20 years or so it will take for a solution that advances the feature set enough that the migration pains are worth an actual, attainable benefit.
so
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let the market deal with it (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a cost to upgrading the corporate intranet, and there is a cost to being owned by industrial spies and spam botnets.
Executives will upgrade when the cost of the one exceeds the cost of the other. Or otherwise, the company will eventually lose enough money and die.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Only fix absolute brokens.
You ever hear the phrase "if we're not moving forward, we're standing still?" You're advocating using a 9 year old browser which is quite literally orders of magnitude slower with modern web applications, and you think it's a good idea to stick with that plan?
Re:The problem is that managers are flat out scare (Score:3, Insightful)
But do they care? No -- they bill it back to the business side, while they collect bonuses year to year about how great a job they did that ONE year. It's not about ROI, it's about one year results that you can pin a medal to.
There is something wrong with that short-term mentality too, but that is a different but related matter.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:1, Insightful)
And people wonder why Apple want's so much control over the iPhone platform. When you support too much legacy stuff, people come to expect it and don't keep their software up-to-date.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Name one other profession or trade or area of expertise where expert advice is so routinely ignored for such trivial reasons.
Parents.
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
***(Why should any corporation upgrade to Windows 7?)***
You are suggesting that good enough is good enough? My God man are you trying to shut down the money machine and actually have IT provide cost savings? Or better yet fade away like Marx's idea of the fate of the ideal communist state?
Do you have the slightest idea what your weird ideas will do to the economy?
Re:My plate is pretty full right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
thousands of people defending smoking as "mostly harmless", and second hand smoke as completely inoffensive
Can you provide even a single reference for that? The reason people smoke is not because they believe it's "mostly harmless". They understand the danger, they just don't care. This is not the attitude that should be taken by any competent IT department. This quote from TFA is interesting:
"It almost looks like individual Internet users are more tech-advanced at home than the IT departments where they work," said Alden DoRosario, Chitika's CTO, in a statement. "It's crazy to think that people whose job description revolves around employees having secure ways to browse the Web would keep IE6 alive, while these same employees go home to more secure browsers."