UK Government Rejects Calls To Upgrade From IE6 233
pcardno writes "The UK government has responded to a petition encouraging government departments to move away from IE6 that had over 6,000 signatories. Their response seems to be that a fully patched IE6 is perfectly safe as long as firewalls and malware scanning tools are in place, and that mandating an upgrade away from IE6 will be too expensive. The second part is fair enough in this age of austerity (I'd rather have my taxes spent on schools and hospitals than software upgrade testing at the moment), but the whole reaction will be a disappointment to the petitioners."
Update: 07/31 11:43 GMT by S : Dan Frydman, the man who launched the petition, has posted a response to the government's decision.
UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need IE8? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me introduce you to the heretical idea of sunk costs.
Having erroneously paid big bucks for something that turned out to be crap is no reason to keep eating shit all day.
If *Quality Control* software is crashing every few hours and holding back the whole company on upgrades, despite being ridiculously expensive, IT or procurement will have to stand up to some rather unpleasant questions some day anyway.
Re:Reading Comprehension? (Score:2, Interesting)
You've obviously have never worked in government IT.
Departments in the UK government spend £millions in testing software. Sad thing is, one department will do the testing, then another has to do exactly the same wasting money in the process.
Re:Frosty Pizzo? (Score:3, Interesting)
anything interesting. Like round corners
And this is why the web has become a mess of eye-candy. I wish IE6's lack of modern shiny had forced producers to focus more on content, but no, it causes them to spend months figuring every hack possible to get things looking pointlessly pixel-perfect.
I still am caught several times a day by a broken back button because some dolt has decided it's okay to implement navigation by only reloading part of the page. And then there's the sites where parts appear in random order over the course of a minute, often not completing entirely, because some hipster decided it would be all Web 2.0 to make 50 small requests. And does that menu really need to animate itself into place over the text I'm reading? Oh, and I want to know when a link is a link so stop disguising them and making me guess.
If you want to inform my mind of how to view your content, just make an interactive PDF. It'll then be easier for me to know to ignore your site. I hate Facebook but I've learnt that Facebook is popular because it's fairly predictable and uniform - once you've browsed one person's page you can browse a hundred million pages without spending time re-learning navigation.
Re:Cleanup (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the inherent problem with software just being old? Do some of the bits fall off?
The problem is that the web has actually moved on from what was standard practice 9 years ago. There are new methods to make crafting pleasant looking web pages easier and more productive. IE6 is simply too out of date for a large chunk of what is possible to do on the web anymore, forcing web developers to waste time doing their sites two ways. In my case, I build my sites to work in all current versions of browsers, and then spend an additional 30% to 40% of my development time making it work in IE6 as well. I'm starting to think of listing support for IE6 as a separate billing item so that the client can more accurately evaluate how important it really is to keep supporting this cranky old beast of a browswer.