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Two factors. One is laziness. Upgrading to Firefox and Chrome takes work. Second is that if they upgraded, there are probably a lot of people who would complain

Two factors. One is laziness. Upgrading to Firefox and Chrome takes work. Second is that if they upgraded, there are probably a lot of people who would complain, "WTF where is my [some menu item from IE]?" These are stupid reasons, but they are enough to prevent companies from upgrading.

Stwerner 15y ago
There is also the cost of labor associated with upgrading. A lot of corporate IT departments don't want to spend the hours upgrading their whole infrastructure when they have other things to do - from my experience IT is expected to run with as little cost as possible - if everything needed for people to complete their work is possible with ie6, there is no incentive to upgrade.
- T-hawk 15y ago
  This, a thousand times this. IE6 persists in corporations not so much from risk-aversion, but simply from inertia and the lack of a cost-benefit justification to upgrade. Windows XP is the real culprit. XP installers even through the latest service packs never came with anything newer than IE6, so it's going to stick around as long as XP does. And given the frequency that most corporate workstations get reassigned and reinstalled and reimaged, IE6 comes out of the reinstallation casket all the time. And consider the users as well. These are corporations with thousands of users with no technical expertise, especially corps in fundamentally non-technological fields like say education or food service. These are the users with twelve handwritten steps on Post-its for how to open their timesheet on the intraweb. Even a switch to tabbed browsing can get them lost in their routines. What IT department wants to spend any amount of time upgrading and retraining these users?
  - seminal 15y ago
    "twelve handwritten steps on Post-its for how to open their timesheet on the intraweb" It's funny to watch this in action.

Stwerner 15y ago

There is also the cost of labor associated with upgrading. A lot of corporate IT departments don't want to spend the hours upgrading their whole infrastructure when they have other things to do - from my experience IT is expected to run with as little cost as possible - if everything needed for people to complete their work is possible with ie6, there is no incentive to upgrade.

T-hawk 15y ago
This, a thousand times this. IE6 persists in corporations not so much from risk-aversion, but simply from inertia and the lack of a cost-benefit justification to upgrade. Windows XP is the real culprit. XP installers even through the latest service packs never came with anything newer than IE6, so it's going to stick around as long as XP does. And given the frequency that most corporate workstations get reassigned and reinstalled and reimaged, IE6 comes out of the reinstallation casket all the time. And consider the users as well. These are corporations with thousands of users with no technical expertise, especially corps in fundamentally non-technological fields like say education or food service. These are the users with twelve handwritten steps on Post-its for how to open their timesheet on the intraweb. Even a switch to tabbed browsing can get them lost in their routines. What IT department wants to spend any amount of time upgrading and retraining these users?
- seminal 15y ago
  "twelve handwritten steps on Post-its for how to open their timesheet on the intraweb" It's funny to watch this in action.