4 ms·
Unfortunately, there are a huge number of corporate environments that have virtually no reason to upgrade their browsing platforms. Many of these environments d
by brandon272 17y ago
Unfortunately, there are a huge number of corporate environments that have virtually no reason to upgrade their browsing platforms. Many of these environments don't even really have a technical reason to not do the upgrade, they are just administered by overworked staff and upgrading IE6 to something newer and safer is just at the bottom of the list.
The bottom line is that until the end users who have to use IE6 every day become inconvenienced enough (in the form of sites blocking them out, not warning them) or the people who pay these IT admins actually think it's a priority, we're not going to make much headway on this issue.
With that said, I think that initiatives like this are a great start. What I would like to see is a distributed technical effort to encourage upgrades, which is what they are doing, followed up a technical effort to block access to IE6 starting on a specific date. Let the note of encouragement that participants place on their sites let users know that unless their browser is upgraded, they will be unable to access the site as of June 1, 2010.
Eventually these IT admins will be placed in the position of having to choose between keeping IE6 to support their legacy intranet applications and upgrading IE6 because third party sites have started to implement functionality that IE6 doesn't support.
- jon_dahl 17y agoOne of my clients ships software to such an organization - several of our users had IE6 installed when Training day rolled around. Interestingly, rather than going through Tech Support to request an upgrade to IE7 (which takes a while), the users opted to just download Firefox.
- trapper 17y agoYou are luckier than us - some of our customers machines are so locked down that they can't even change the date let alone install firefox. We even tried using portable apps on a usb stick, no luck there either! Arrgh.
- andyking 17y agoSomeone installed Firefox on a computer at a non-profit radio station I was involved with not so long ago. The owner of the station sent an email to all saying that if he found out who had installed the "firefox trojan" on the office PC, he would "sue them and call in the police". A few days later, all computers in the building had been downgraded from IE8 to IE6 and locked down so users couldn't even reboot. It's now official policy in that company that if anyone puts their own USB drive into an office computer, they'll be asked to leave the station. There is electrical tape stuck over the USB ports. That's the sort of mindless, dribbling paranoia you're up against.
- cpach 17y agoIf they're running Windows, I can somewhat understand the paranoia.
- brandon272 17y agoThis is the situation I see in many corporate environments. Thin clients set up and users who aren't allowed to download or install any new applications, Firefox included!
- jodrellblank 17y agoDownload and install? If it's one of ours, they wont even be able to right click! ;)
- jodrellblank 17y agoWhy would they need to change the date? It syncs with a domain controller and if you knock it more than 15 minutes or so out you'll break kerberos and your username and password will stop working, and then you'll tell me "you didn't do anything" and "it was working fine". :-/
- trapper 17y agoLaptop + travel across timezones.
- jbyers 17y agoMore unfortunate still is the huge number of schools trapped in an IE 6 world. Primary and secondary school IT in the US must be worse off than corporate IT -- far too little money, time, and staff to worry about browser versions. Our audience is largely educators and our IE 6 percentage (12% or so) seem stuck now after a steady decline this past year.