3 ms·

This will always be a problem. The corporates and most of the business will always use whatever comes with their OS, for a simple reason that they don't have ad

by jaspero 16y ago

This will always be a problem. The corporates and most of the business will always use whatever comes with their OS, for a simple reason that they don't have administrative rights to upgrade their browser, or simply because its just an extra overhead for the corporation to upgrade thousands of their workstations. I can't think of any alternatives to this problem. I am pretty sure I will still be considering IE6 while developing websites in 2015, let alone IE8.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
Not to mention that IE's turn-around time will almost always be longer than, for instance, Firefox's, or Chrome's, etc., since Microsoft is inherently less flexible than the others. Oh, and don't forget that a lot of proprietary corporate apps are written to work ONLY in IE6. I wonder if a "legacy" mode for new versions of IE would alleviate part of this problem. (And yeah, I know that there's a big fat bag of poisonous acid-spitting kitten-eating snakes that this would open up.)
- jaspero 16y ago
  Firefox and Chrome would have the same fate, if they are as widely used as Windows/IE and comes default with an OS(Windows killer), like IE.
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    Which fate? Slow release cycles, or apps written specifically for a single browser?
    - jaspero 16y ago
      Fate as in, if Mozilla came up with a Windows-killer OS and all the Windows user moved to the new Mozilla OS. Than people will be stuck with FF 3.6, even after 10 years from now.
      - heimidal 16y ago
        There is no evidence to support this assertion. The new auto-upgrade model Mozilla has adopted for FF 4.0 (and that Chrome has had for ages) makes upgrade cycles, for all practical purposes, negligible. Chrome 6.0 was released on September 2. Since then, Chrome 5.0's market share has dropped to nearly 0%, with Chrome 6.0 picking up all of 5.0's share while also absorbing a good amount of IE's share. If Microsoft instituted an auto-upgrade path for IE and released updates with more regularity, this would slowly become a thing of the past.
        zooey 16y ago
        In Enterprise Company there is no such thing as "Auto Upgrade"
        jaspero 16y ago
        I haven't tried it but can you upgrade those browsers without administrative rights? I am assuming you can't do it on corporate settings.
        nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
        On Windows, if the user installs Chrome, it's installed into the user's home directory (local application data or something). This means the user does not need admin rights to either install or upgrade Chrome.
        sid0 16y ago
        There are several ways to update programs on Windows without needing admin rights: - You could do it as Chrome does and have a per-user install. I don't think Mozilla wants to do this. - You could install a service or a scheduled task to do the work for you. - MSI updates can be installed without admin rights if they're Authenticode signed, and Mozilla does have a valid Authenticode digital certificate.
        barake 16y ago
        Over half our Firefox traffic is still pre-3.6. Not IE6 bad, but it lacks CSS gradients and such.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- Joeri 16y ago
  The legacy mode is exactly the problem. They have an IE7 legacy mode in IE9, so upgrading once you are on IE7 or up is generally not that big of a deal. I still fail to recognize any other reason than corporate decision making for why IE8 didn't have an IE6 legacy mode. I can understand they didn't understand the issues when they released IE7, but by the time IE8 got shipped they should have known better.
eitally 16y ago
There is a lot of pressure mounting for even the most slothful corporations to upgrade, both their browsers and their legacy web apps that [currently] only run in IE6. This is partially to do with the growing prevalence of enterprise-ready web apps & services, but also with Microsoft's insistence that they really will kill XP and IE6 in 2014. The same thing recently happened when they finally killed support for XP SP2 (just last month) and there was a big run to upgrade millions of corporate PCs to SP3 (which forces an IE upgrade unless you do all sorts of not recommended funky hacks to prevent it). As an aside, most companies for whom IE6 is an elephant-scale problem are using both AD and MS SCCM for user configuration management & group policy controls. CM makes it trivial to deploy stuff across the board, including complex software like OS service packs [and browser upgrades]. I posted before that my own org is in the process of upgrading everyone to IE8 right now, but we switched to Firefox as our standard browser about a year ago and are currently testing the new Chrome MSI (woohoo for GPO support), since even though Google's interpretation of the HTML5 standard includes a few things that aren't actually in the draft yet, it works much better with Google Apps. You won't have to worry about IE6 in 2015.

by jaspero 16y ago

pavel_lishin 16y ago

Not to mention that IE's turn-around time will almost always be longer than, for instance, Firefox's, or Chrome's, etc., since Microsoft is inherently less flexible than the others. Oh, and don't forget that a lot of proprietary corporate apps are written to work ONLY in IE6. I wonder if a "legacy" mode for new versions of IE would alleviate part of this problem. (And yeah, I know that there's a big fat bag of poisonous acid-spitting kitten-eating snakes that this would open up.)

jaspero 16y ago
Firefox and Chrome would have the same fate, if they are as widely used as Windows/IE and comes default with an OS(Windows killer), like IE.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  Which fate? Slow release cycles, or apps written specifically for a single browser?
  - jaspero 16y ago
    Fate as in, if Mozilla came up with a Windows-killer OS and all the Windows user moved to the new Mozilla OS. Than people will be stuck with FF 3.6, even after 10 years from now.
    - heimidal 16y ago
      There is no evidence to support this assertion. The new auto-upgrade model Mozilla has adopted for FF 4.0 (and that Chrome has had for ages) makes upgrade cycles, for all practical purposes, negligible. Chrome 6.0 was released on September 2. Since then, Chrome 5.0's market share has dropped to nearly 0%, with Chrome 6.0 picking up all of 5.0's share while also absorbing a good amount of IE's share. If Microsoft instituted an auto-upgrade path for IE and released updates with more regularity, this would slowly become a thing of the past.
      - zooey 16y ago
        In Enterprise Company there is no such thing as "Auto Upgrade"
      - jaspero 16y ago
        I haven't tried it but can you upgrade those browsers without administrative rights? I am assuming you can't do it on corporate settings.
        nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
        On Windows, if the user installs Chrome, it's installed into the user's home directory (local application data or something). This means the user does not need admin rights to either install or upgrade Chrome.
        sid0 16y ago
        There are several ways to update programs on Windows without needing admin rights: - You could do it as Chrome does and have a per-user install. I don't think Mozilla wants to do this. - You could install a service or a scheduled task to do the work for you. - MSI updates can be installed without admin rights if they're Authenticode signed, and Mozilla does have a valid Authenticode digital certificate.
      - barake 16y ago
        Over half our Firefox traffic is still pre-3.6. Not IE6 bad, but it lacks CSS gradients and such.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
Joeri 16y ago
The legacy mode is exactly the problem. They have an IE7 legacy mode in IE9, so upgrading once you are on IE7 or up is generally not that big of a deal. I still fail to recognize any other reason than corporate decision making for why IE8 didn't have an IE6 legacy mode. I can understand they didn't understand the issues when they released IE7, but by the time IE8 got shipped they should have known better.

eitally 16y ago

There is a lot of pressure mounting for even the most slothful corporations to upgrade, both their browsers and their legacy web apps that [currently] only run in IE6. This is partially to do with the growing prevalence of enterprise-ready web apps & services, but also with Microsoft's insistence that they really will kill XP and IE6 in 2014. The same thing recently happened when they finally killed support for XP SP2 (just last month) and there was a big run to upgrade millions of corporate PCs to SP3 (which forces an IE upgrade unless you do all sorts of not recommended funky hacks to prevent it). As an aside, most companies for whom IE6 is an elephant-scale problem are using both AD and MS SCCM for user configuration management & group policy controls. CM makes it trivial to deploy stuff across the board, including complex software like OS service packs [and browser upgrades]. I posted before that my own org is in the process of upgrading everyone to IE8 right now, but we switched to Firefox as our standard browser about a year ago and are currently testing the new Chrome MSI (woohoo for GPO support), since even though Google's interpretation of the HTML5 standard includes a few things that aren't actually in the draft yet, it works much better with Google Apps. You won't have to worry about IE6 in 2015.