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Part of the problem is how enterprise-y companies do things. Taking 3 months to roll out a new browser is ridiculous. But then, so is designing your website t

Part of the problem is how enterprise-y companies do things. Taking 3 months to roll out a new browser is ridiculous. But then, so is designing your website to only work on the most popular browser, and they do that, too. Fix the latter and you can probably fix the former at the same time.

arethuza 15y ago
"Taking 3 months to roll out a new browser is ridiculous." Unless you have pretty poor infrastructure, actually rolling out a new version should be trivial, it's the testing to confirm that the new version doesn't break anything vital that will take the time.
- chriserin 15y ago
  In my experience, there are few departments that have automated tests that could assist in shortening the testing cycle. If there is a bug with a new version of firefox then it will take 3 months to fix it because of the long development and deployment cycles exacerbated by a heavy bureaucracy.
eitally 15y ago
Yeah, in an ideal world.... This is a really ignorant statement, though. Just one of my teams has a tracking spreadsheet for >100 web apps they support. A fair number of those are "legacy" -- created by folks who are no longer with the company, or which are no longer the standard way of performing a task -- but are unkillable for one reason or another. Besides homegrown stuff, certain versions of expensive commercial software only support specific browsers and versions of browsers. If you have to test, AND you have to setup GPOs for users at the app-level because of browser incompatibilities, it is completely understandable why the internal upgrade cycle can take longer than the vendor's upgrade cycle. You should spend some time in enterprise IT and see what it's like on the other side of the fence.
- pohl 15y ago
  That problem could be easily solved by having multiple browsers installed so that a user could chose one that works with a broken, legacy web app. IT departments could roll out two different browsers in a tick-tock manner.
  - cageface 15y ago
    If you think it's easy to teach users to intelligently choose among several different browsers for each of several web apps you've never worked in corporate IT before.
    - rayvega 15y ago
      Users have already been taught to choose among different desktop apps. How? By clicking on installed shortcut links on their desktop. The same can be done with internal web apps. Treat these legacy web apps just like desktop apps in that launching them requires clicking an icon specifically for that web app somewhere on their machine that opens the web app in the appropriate browser. Those browsers (like IE6) could be locked down to only work for certain URLs. For everything else, the user would then just need to use a more modern web browser such as Firefox 5.0. An ambitious startup could find many other (and probably better) ways to solve this problem. The issue with legacy web apps that run only on IE6 always struck me as a potential business opportunity for any startup interested in targeting the enterprise space. With Firefox's recent shift to an accelerated release cycle, it has made this problem even more pronounce.

arethuza 15y ago

"Taking 3 months to roll out a new browser is ridiculous." Unless you have pretty poor infrastructure, actually rolling out a new version should be trivial, it's the testing to confirm that the new version doesn't break anything vital that will take the time.

chriserin 15y ago
In my experience, there are few departments that have automated tests that could assist in shortening the testing cycle. If there is a bug with a new version of firefox then it will take 3 months to fix it because of the long development and deployment cycles exacerbated by a heavy bureaucracy.

eitally 15y ago

Yeah, in an ideal world.... This is a really ignorant statement, though. Just one of my teams has a tracking spreadsheet for >100 web apps they support. A fair number of those are "legacy" -- created by folks who are no longer with the company, or which are no longer the standard way of performing a task -- but are unkillable for one reason or another. Besides homegrown stuff, certain versions of expensive commercial software only support specific browsers and versions of browsers. If you have to test, AND you have to setup GPOs for users at the app-level because of browser incompatibilities, it is completely understandable why the internal upgrade cycle can take longer than the vendor's upgrade cycle. You should spend some time in enterprise IT and see what it's like on the other side of the fence.

pohl 15y ago
That problem could be easily solved by having multiple browsers installed so that a user could chose one that works with a broken, legacy web app. IT departments could roll out two different browsers in a tick-tock manner.
- cageface 15y ago
  If you think it's easy to teach users to intelligently choose among several different browsers for each of several web apps you've never worked in corporate IT before.
  - rayvega 15y ago
    Users have already been taught to choose among different desktop apps. How? By clicking on installed shortcut links on their desktop. The same can be done with internal web apps. Treat these legacy web apps just like desktop apps in that launching them requires clicking an icon specifically for that web app somewhere on their machine that opens the web app in the appropriate browser. Those browsers (like IE6) could be locked down to only work for certain URLs. For everything else, the user would then just need to use a more modern web browser such as Firefox 5.0. An ambitious startup could find many other (and probably better) ways to solve this problem. The issue with legacy web apps that run only on IE6 always struck me as a potential business opportunity for any startup interested in targeting the enterprise space. With Firefox's recent shift to an accelerated release cycle, it has made this problem even more pronounce.