5 ms·
IE6 is not going away for a long time because of corporate nightmares like these
- seasoup 17y agoThere are unfortunately ALOT of corporate programs that will only run on IE6. At work, our main app is optimized for IE6 but we are trying to ween our customers off of it and onto IE7... but all IE7 bugs are P2s at worst because IE6 is what our customers are using.
- patio11 17y agoAt the day job, legacy installations mean IE6 compatibility is a requirement and all other compatibility is a luxury. I prioritize accordingly. Its not like I can tell my customer "Look, I know telling you to upgrade your browser is going to break that 3 million dollar CRM system you've been using for the last 8 years... but you'll get transparent PNGs!"
- btipling 17y agoWell eventually the argument will be "You'll be able to use the real internet!"
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoHow does it use IE6, why was it not designed for the web in the first place? What other single point of failures were chosen in the design phase? That feature matched CRM, or probably a better one, may be available as OSS now for nothing but the cost of a few developers to create some shims and massage things into place?
- sid 17y agoAt my previous company. A well know global airlines we just put out a tender for cargo management and loading systems. All the vendors were ie6 compliant but did not certify for ie7 or any other browser. I tested many of the demo applications on ie7 and on firefox and they totally rendered incorrectly. Even at this time corporations are not upgrading and i guess they wont as long as vendors continue to provide ie6 compliant applications without support for any others. Goes to show how slow corporations move these days, even for something as simple as a browser (in comparision to other upgrades they make).
- blasdel 17y agoThis has nothing to do with IE6's rendering engine, and everything to do with ActiveX.
- chime 17y agoAbsolutely. Now if you're a small vendor, you have no choice but to downgrade all your computers to IE6 in order to enable your employees to access business critical information. Because of how complex the configuration is, running IE6 in parallel with IE7/8 with hacks will not work. And there is no other way to access this data. So now even though other browsers might be installed, most users will use IE6 for regular browsing. I want IE6 to die but I'm afraid it'll be a while.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoI run IE6 (an a virtualbox VM with WinXP) alongside IE8 and FF, Saf, Op, Chrome, etc., for testing purposes. It even runs IE5, IE4 but I don't have to bother with them except when I want a laugh. MultipleIE (from tredosoft.com), simples.
- wglb 17y agoInsanity.
- paulitex 17y agoOh god that's depressing.
- ars 17y agoWhat is special about IE6 that doesn't work on other versions?
- seasoup 17y agoA lot of things about IE6 are not standards compliant, so it's either programs for both or program for just IE6 and there is never enough time/resources to develop for both.
- ars 17y agoI thought the later IE's had special rendering compatibility modes that do the same as IE6.
- ivank 17y agoThe same as IE7.
- prodigal_erik 17y agoHTML worked fine. It's the documents which are not compliant, because they use non-HTML frills and were not correctly designed to degrade gracefully without them.
- adbachman 17y agoThey're not "taking advantage" of IE6 any more than the financial industry and the Social Security Administration are taking advantage of COBOL. It's simply that the software exists and has been coded and tested against IE6. For a company as large as Sprint (and many other like them), the cost to refactor or rewrite huge swaths of their codebase are extremely prohibitive. The benefit of the upgrade does not outweigh the detriment. This is why companies like Citrix exist. Virtualization is a good market to be in right now.
- zmimon 17y agoI am trying to figure this out as well. I can understand there are problems - layout issues, popup windows blocked, activex controls denied permissions. However all these seem like things that are either totally cosmetic or could be fixed with relatively minor hacks - most of them with just registry configurations or an alternative stylesheet here and there. If people could name actual technical reasons why apps break then I'm sure a group of interested parties could quickly form an open source project to develop a compatilibity layer / plugin / something that would bridge the IE7 - IE6 gap. But nobody ever seems to get down to that level of specificity. I have to think that it's really mostly about corporate inertia and lack of desire rather than actual real technical challenges.
- derefr 17y agoWhy can't Microsoft simply take the IE6 codebase and refactor it into a static, standalone "Legacy Intranet Browser" that, similar to Mozilla Prism, will generate a locked-in "site launcher" for each site it must be used on?
- alexitosrv 17y agoOT: I didn't know about Mozilla Prism. It looks very useful! Thank you.
- chrischen 17y agoPersonally i don't like Prism. The idea of taking an app not specifically designed for desktop use and pretending it is a desktop app seems like a waste of time or temporary fix.
- btipling 17y agoI thought that too, but I've been using it for unfuddle and I prefer it this way. It gives me a separate window and dock icon from my regular browser, and just works well with the self contained system that is Unfuddle.
- chrischen 17y agoYea I can see if it has utility right now but it's really a temporary fix to the problem. I think it detracts from the better goal of making rich web apps that run without a browser and the gradual blur between desktop and web apps.
- adbachman 17y agoDone (more or less). IE6 application compatibility virtual PC 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... I use it at work to test our sites against IE6. Boots in about 5 seconds and runs IE6 as well as can be expected.
- CamperBob 17y agoWhy doesn't somebody just write a goddamn dedicated IE6 emulator and be done with it...
- Pistos2 17y agoSo I guess I'm blessed that my workplace's intranet is coded to Firefox, and we dropped support for IE6 for our customer-facing sites a year ago?
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoIf it's "coded to Firefox" then they're doing it wrong. If it's coded to web standards and only FF is supported, that's a different matter. Suppose a patent problem came up (as with GIFs in the past) and FF couldn't be used legally any more. If you code to FF you'll probably find you're OK, but if you code to standards then any standards compliant browser should be a drop-in replacement.
- Pistos2 17y agoIt's coded so that we only have to check if it works in Firefox. It's not like we're explicitly trying to leverage Firefox-only markup or CSS. I believe the idea is to reduce waste of development time and effort. I think I'm going to call YAGNI at this point re: future patent problems. I don't see that happening soon, and I'd gladly take the time savings now, and cross that bridge when we get to it -- if it comes at all.
- rwebb 17y agowhat's the big deal? looks like a nice site.
- clemesha 17y agoIt's either us or them - personally, I choose the former.
- nexneo 17y agoNot surprisingly, above page created in MS Word. What one can expect further. <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 12"> <meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 12">
- tybris 17y agoRealism? On Hacker News? I thought we had all agreed to act as if IT consists entirely of web start-ups with no such thing as legacy, even though that's probably 99% of the pie.
- geedee77 17y agoI work for a major law firm (think top 6 worldwide) and we run a DM system that requires IE6 only (ie, doesn't work in IE7 even) so every office worldwide is tied into IE6. Only recently have we started rewriting it to work in newer browsers ... and I don't expect a working prototype before middle of next year!
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoThe docs and metadata are in a DB, just have a new frontend written to match the old UI but with knobs on. Should be done and ready to test by next weekend (inside joke ;0). Or just get an OSS DM system and munge it together with the old DB. Perhaps knowledgetree would be a starting point for that.
- cubicle67 17y agoI can't see a date anywhere. Does anyone know how old this is (please, please don't say it's current)?