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from the comments: You do realize that a large portion of people that are using IE6 are at work where they have NO control over the browser... i hear this eve
by there 17y ago
from the comments:
You do realize that a large portion of people that are using IE6 are at work where they have NO control over the browser...
i hear this every time the ie6 argument comes up, and yet, i've never heard from someone that actually works in one of these IT departments that can vouch for this.
who are these unsympathetic robots who, while ironically working in an IT department, are so out of touch with technology that they fail to understand their users are stuck using insecure, out-of-date software that is now increasingly being blocked? are these users still using 500mhz machines with windows 98, too?
- alaskamiller 17y agoNot even the US military subject itself to the stupidity that is IE6.
- sachinag 17y agoThe U.S. State Department, however, does.
- otto 17y agoAs of how recent? As far as I know all government machines are running FDCC(Federal Desktop Core Configuration) and the machines I've seen run IE7 with many IT departments recommending Firefox.
- hassy 17y agoAs does Britain's Ministry of Defence as well as many other departments in the British government. Moreover, they don't even have upgrade plans in place either.
- robin_reala 17y agoReference: http://www.kable.co.uk/government-internet-browsers-23jul09 http://www.kable.co.uk/government-internet-browsers-23jul09
- j2d2 17y agoThese unsympathetic robots are all the people that are using Windows 2000. I've seen people in firms that refuse to update their version of windows. They all seem to hate this and don't expect much of a browsing experience from these machines anyway...
- there 17y agoso is the refusal coming from the IT person or the end-user? perhaps instead of all these silly campaigns to try to force users to upgrade, they should make a simple questionnaire that asks the user why they are still using ie6, and then publish the results. i have a feeling the leading reason will not be "because some jerk in IT won't let me".
- johns 17y agoSee the digg survey link below (or here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742057 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742057)
- drusenko 17y agoOur perspective is that the more people that are prompted about their outdated browsing experience, the more pressure the IT department will be getting to get their ass in gear and upgrade their decade old computer systems. You can bet that if the volume of complaints triples, it will start to become a major priority -- especially if the complaints are coming from the top.
- run4yourlives 17y agoActually I think the response would be, "What's a browser?"
- Bluem00 17y agoHere's an anecdote from my experience: The majority of the users of my company's web application use IE6 on Windows 2000. Additionally, many of these computers have Vista stickers on them, and are quite powerful. Their IT groups already have established practices to support the machines, and they are used almost exclusively to surf the web and run software that was purchased 5 years ago. Our users aren't even unhappy, as their work does not center around a computer; thus, the corporate IT infrastructure has no motivation to upgrade them. That said, we still pressure them to upgrade, and I'll be extremely happy when they eventually do.
- jmcannon 17y agoIE6 is still very prevalent in the American school system (don't know about elsewhere). We used to sell a web product to schools and you wouldn't believe the number of districts using IE6 for "compatibility" with their network software or because they don't consider upgrading a priority.
- mnemonicsloth 17y agoOne of my co-founders has been a public school teacher for the last 20 years or so. She says that the school system's primary function is to give America's least competent individuals a way to stay in the middle class.
- krakensden 17y agoWhile that's true, it's beside the point. All the public schools I've been to do not have an `IT Department', the computers there were just installed in a fire-and-forget manner. Often the school district has some people who are supposed to be in charge of it, but they don't come around very often, and honestly don't have the time, money, or manpower to set up something sane.
- ironkeith 17y agoI know from extremely unpleasant experience that many large Canadian government organizations are still using IE6+XP. Further, I know of at least one large health region still on IE6+XP. Change takes a while in these monolithic bureaucracies; especially when they have to ensure that any upgrades to software have no negative effects to any other software installed on the system (a lot of which can be equal parts shoddy and proprietary). As an aside, I've been working with a large government client for 2.5 years now, and I still haven't been able to get their IT dept. to add Flash to their image to support the streaming video site they paid my company to build (hooray for Windows Media Player).
- aichcon 17y agoThe problem is internal legacy applications that only work in IE6. If they upgrade browsers the apps break, so in order to support these apps they keep IE 6. The question for them is 'do we spend time and money to update all of our applications to upgrade a browser, or just leave things the way they are for now?'
- drusenko 17y agoSame reply here as below: "Sorry, that's not an excuse. IE 8 comes with a "compatibility mode" feature where any site can choose to use the IE 6 rendering engine by setting headers or meta tags appropriately."
- eli 17y agoNope.. that compatibility mode is for IE7, not IE6. (And my understanding is that it's not even a perfect emulation of IE7.) Microsoft's official recommendation for developers is to install IE6 in a VM if you need to test compatibility. It's that bad.
- 100k 17y agoSpeaking of which, do you know where I can find IE 6 so I can install it in a VM and test our site? MultipleIE doesn't work on Windows 7, which is what I'm using.
- eli 17y agoDunno about Win7 compatibility, but this is the official VPC image: http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21e... Personally, I'd probably just use a VMWare image of XP or Win98 and download IE6 from here http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1E1550CB-5E5D-48F5-B02B-20B602228DE6&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1E1...
- drusenko 17y ago
- clistctrl 17y agoThey're people who work in firms that have intranet applications that were written specifically for IE6. Its cheaper to keep the browser than update some very badly written software.
- drusenko 17y agoSorry, that's not an excuse. IE 8 comes with a "compatibility mode" feature where any site can choose to use the IE 6 rendering engine by setting headers or meta tags appropriately.
- jmtulloss 17y agoThat was an excuse until fairly recently. IE8 is pretty new to the scene, and hopefully this feature will allow corporations to upgrade.
- jodrellblank 17y agoSorry, that's not an excuse I wasn't aware that companies needed an 'excuse' for not putting time and effort into a project they don't care about.
- drusenko 17y agoThey don't -- we're trying to give them a reason to care.
- dmm 17y agoThat feature was taken out of IE8 before release.
- sepa 17y agoI am currently working at one of the largest beverage corporations of the world, and not only they continue to use IE6 but also they methodically inspect every Windows OS update, even if its a security patch, it can be months until they decide to update the network with such patches and updates.
- czstrong 17y agoI'm currently an intern at a large biotech company which employs over 25,000 people world-wide and all the machines come with IE6. I'm an intern at their headquarters in a section of the IT department that doesn't deal with maintaining the software on the computers. However, there was one larger meeting where I remember someone asking about upgrading IE, and the response was something like, "Uhh, I've been pretty busy, I'll get around to it eventually." Everyone just laughed and I could tell it was a kind of ongoing joke. I think the general attitude is that no one here really cares enough to go through the work of upgrading everyone. I don't think they get many complaints, and their job isn't in jeopardy, so they just sit on it until something or someone really big makes them act.
- drusenko 17y agoThat's what we figure -- the more complaints coming through the door, the more pressure will be put on the IT department to upgrade.
- sjs382 17y agoAt my day job we have some (unpatched?) Windows 2000 machine (no service packs) running IE 5.5 (I think?). I carry around a flash drive with a Portable Firefox (among other apps) install on it for browsing at work. They're 2.0 gHz P4 Dell machines if you're really interested in the specs. :p
- alextp 17y agoWell, a couple of years ago I was forced to use IE6 on a 500mhz machine running windows2000 in a project in the local government. It was not pretty, although I managed to install XEmacs and survive.
- Dobbs 17y agoGM requires the use of IE6, or it at least did when my father last worked there (about a year and a half, two years ago). It could have changed by now but considering they were just moving from 95 to 98 when he left I doubt it.
- tedunangst 17y agoWere you actually expecting to hear from an IE6 IT shop on HN? The people living in that world don't often post here. Next you'll say that nobody ever calls their computer case the CPU because you haven't seen anybody do it here.
- jadence 17y agoI know employees at Cost Plus World Market headquarters are stuck using IE6.
- run4yourlives 17y agoThe official browser at my office is IE6. Of course I have chrome, firefox and safari installed, but most employees here don't have local admin access. >who are these unsympathetic robots who The enterprise IT department that's who.
- webwright 17y agohttp://blog.digg.com/?p=878 http://blog.digg.com/?p=878 <==== Data Digg surveyed IE6 users. 76% of those surveyed DO NOT HAVE THE POWER/AUTHORITY/ABILITY to upgrade. "Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic. We’re committed to developing to Web standards and building new ways to help you discover the best of the Web. Keeping an eye on what technologies folks use and why they’re being used is a big part of it."
- qeorge 17y agoI posted an eerily similar comment 2 minutes after yours (minus the yelling). I also found the digg survey quite revealing.
- drusenko 17y agoThe Digg survey shows that 70% of IE6 users are corporate, but there's no indication how representative that is of the web as a whole. Either way, this initiative is targeted straight at those users. We've heard from several sources that many corporate IT departments don't feel any need or urgency to upgrade, and receive very few complaints. We see this as a start -- the more complaints the IT department gets (especially from on top), the more pressure they'll feel to upgrade. Even if they can't upgrade IE 6 due to legacy applications, they could always install a version of Firefox side-by-side and only use IE 6 for the legacy apps. For the other subset of IE6 users (moms, grandmothers, etc), this will be a great notice to let them know that their web experience is seriously degraded, and that they should strongly consider upgrading their web browser.
- irrelative 17y agoReally not trying to be snarky here, but I don't think too many grandmothers are using weebly or reading reddit.
- drusenko 17y agoSorry, there may not be too many grandmothers reading reddit, but our userbase is very much non-technical.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jodrellblank 17y agoi've never heard from someone that actually works in one of these IT departments Hi! who are these unsympathetic robots who, while ironically working in an IT department, are so out of touch with technology The same people who get emails from vendors warning us off upgrading to IE7 or certain programs will break. The same people who have had such pain from flakey apps for all sorts of reasons that we just don't dare upgrade. The same people who use anti-virus, non-administrator accounts and gateway HTTP, FTP and SMTP proxies with scanners to reduce the risks. The same people who've learned to beat their inner geek into submission to the principle of 'if it's not broken, and you don't want it broken, leave it alone. Companies want sameness, predictability and uptime, not features, novelty, CSS compliance or security'.
- robin_reala 17y agoBy choosing the easy path for yourself you’re choosing the hard path for web developers. Sooner rather than later this tension will become too much and you’ll find that websites simply stop supporting your browser of choice. But, like someone already mentioned in this thread it’s not a binary choice. Install Firefox (or an equivalent up-to-date browser) for normal browsing and leave IE6 on the machines for legacy apps.
- bmelton 17y agoIn a lot of cases (including mine), IT operators are working with zero budget. While there's the obvious argument that upgrading from a free browser to another free browser doesn't cost any money, it does cost time; I work at a federal agency in which their web applications HAVE to work, and unfortunately, many of them were written for IE6. Rewriting those applications to support a new browser isn't free either. In addition that that, there is time spent securing the installation. In the case of IE it's a little easier as I can manage it with policies, but it is absolutely critical that we're following DOD stigs regarding security, and setting up a central policy isn't free. Regarding the PC comment, the laptop I replaced a month ago was a 1.0Ghz Pentium with 512M RAM. This was the upgraded laptop at the time, that I needed for java development. Compiling code with 512M on XP was adventurous. For the last 8 months I had it, the internal LCD had died, most of the keys didn't work, the WiFi radio was completely dead, and the power button would only work if I wiggled the frame and monitor. I made sure to use it on a plugged-in (ethernet network) to bypass the WiFi, plugged into an external monitor to get around the LCD, grabbed an external keyboard to type on, and wiggled it every day to power it on. Before deeming it dead, they replaced the motherboard 3 times and the hard drive twice. I kept using the decrepit old machine because frankly, it was the nicest laptop anyone had on the team. They're refreshing the machines now, but we've only had IE7 in the environment for about a month. I am lucky in that I can use Firefox, but only within the firewall, and not at all to browse any external sites. Sorry, I kind of got off on a tangent here, but it's perfectly reasonable to understand that there ARE in fact reasons why it takes a long time to get off of IE6.
- cakesy 17y agoI have worked at a place like this. You clearly have never worked for a large bank, or financial institution. Or a company that has a lot of internal processes designed for ie6/active-x. It is great, like stepping back into the past, but not the good past of dinosaurs or gladiators, but the shit past of 6 years ago, when we didn't know any better. You no longer want to use a computer at home, since you are constantly reminded of the shit you are using at work.
- Jem 17y agoI don't now, but have worked in 3 different locations where IE6 was forced on its users. All education. They have different financial priorities than spending time on upgrading software that "just works".