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I still occasionally maintain a website for a school, with stats that'll horrify you. Around 78% of browsers hitting the site are running IE8, and these will b
by shakna 6y ago
I still occasionally maintain a website for a school, with stats that'll horrify you.
Around 78% of browsers hitting the site are running IE8, and these will be parents making use of the portal to do stuff like check calendar dates, book appointments to see teachers, and check student grades.
We tried extremely hard to move the community onwards, including outreach to upgrade computers for families and so on. But in the end, they just don't want to move on from Windows XP because everything else is too confusing. Even if you make it look the same.
As for how often they're using the site... It's somewhere around 1/3rd of the parents hit it at least once a day using an outdated browser.
... Whilst their kids are using school-provided Thinkpads all running on Windows 10, or recent-ish school-provided iPads. (The school does all the maintenance on them as well).
- searchableguy 6y agoI don't remember there was any computer in any of my schools that didn't use IE exclusively and still do, I presume. Windows xp + IE + elicipse + office 2003 or 2007 I think.
- dyingkneepad 6y agoIs this in the USA?
- shakna 6y agoFarming community in Australia.
- Spivak 6y agoI used to work in school IT. If Google and Mozilla aren't going to step up their "managed browser" game then we're going to continue seeing MS and Apple dominate education. It's not like school IT depts like running IE, but it's basically the only browser you can lock down. "But you shouldn't lock down kids' browsers, and let them have blah blah..." Okay look, I don't actually give two shits if little Marcus wants to browse Pornhub on his school laptop, we're honestly not paid enough to care. But we do have administration breathing down our necks, school policies to enforce, and angry detached parents to appease.
- shakna 6y agoOh, the school itself had fully moved to Firefox. Not quite as easy as IE, but a few group policies and you're mostly done. It was the parents who refused to move beyond XP.
- jdofaz 6y agoChrome has all kinds of enterprisy management stuff now
- extra88 6y agoYou absolutely can manage Firefox, you can even keep doing it using GPOs. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-enterprise/policies-customization-enterprise/policies-overview-enterprise https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-enterpris...
- wonderlg 6y agoI’m not doubting you, but how is that even possible? How do these people visit any other website? I don’t think much works in IE8 nowadays.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hombre_fatal 6y agoThe only way I think this could happen is if everyone is still on Windows XP. Probably because pirated winxp was still being circulated when the parents installed. Still hard for me to believe the figures though. 78%??? Wonder which country they live in. I've seen things like that here in Mexico but not winxp, and not in 2020. And not to younger parents with kids who can use computers. Maybe they're in China or something where pirated winxp still apparently flourishes.
- shakna 6y agoNo, Australia. Just a farming community where you can't guarantee every household even has a computer (hence school-provided for students). Most of the parents I dealt with treated technology like it might be infectious, and they didn't want to get sick. Most didn't even have email.
- shakna 6y agoAre number of these same parents complained rather loudly when programming was added to the curriculum, because if they didn't understand "the technology", they didn't want it in their home. Think... The sort of people who print and mail pictures someone found on the internet, because they never touch email. They don't actually want to visit any website.