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.
Cleanup (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
That AutoRun virus that was going around a while back, how much did that cost to clean up?
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Re:Cleanup (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cleanup (Score:5, Insightful)
Software being too old, insecure and barely compatible is reason enough. A browser is a must-have piece of software nowadays and if you absolutely depend on a specific version of a specific product line, you're doing things wrong in the first place.
As IE6 is absolutely not available on any new version of Windows, it's effectively holding back all significant upgrades on the core operating system. Without updates to the operating system, the entire IT landscape is not only severely hobbled for innovation, but thoroughly insecure on major issues.
Don't allow yourself to fall prey to the illusion that software upgrades are an entirely voluntary - or useless - effort. In the best possible scenarios, holding back upgrades is saving a few percent of the cost and postponing the rest of upgrade expenditures. In friendly real-world scenarios, it's not saving any, merely postponing all upgrade costs. In any case, it's very very likely that during decade-long upgrade holdouts, IT department will lose it's edge and sharpness, get complacent and behind on the current state-of-the-art. And with that, the whole company will lose its pace.
Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 is easy. Upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major undertaking and upgrading from any older version is financial disaster.
Just because you CAN use old equipment until it literally falls apart, it doesn't mean it's the most sensible or cost-effective option to do so.
Re:Cleanup (Score:5, Insightful)
Software being too old, insecure and barely compatible
old
What is the inherent problem with software just being old? Do some of the bits fall off? Some of the bytes?
insecure
Many people here would remind you that it is insecure because of what it is - MS Windows. If you are going to replace it with MS Windows, it will still be insecure. Large organisations spend a lot of time keeping it secure. That is why people tell me they are not happy about our rules on what you can connect to our network, rules on USB, security policies and much much more.
barely compatible
That is a lot better that Vista which is not compatible at all and Windows 7 which needs to run a virual machine to be able to run most "corporate" applications.
In fact, this is the big killer. We have completely avoided Vista because major applications would not work. Now we are being told that we need to roll out an operating system that will not run on a reasonable fraction of our estate. Then, to make things work, we need to have XP on all of them as well?
Yes, I know that if we have to have the applications rewritten, getting them to work in a grown-up operating system would be a good idea and making all web apps browser agnostic is a must. That costs money now. Carrying on pushes it into the future.
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.
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Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 is easy. Upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major undertaking
Except, to upgrade from Vista you would first need to downgrade from XP to Vista, and that's a REALLY major disaster by itself.
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The "Vista is bad" mantra is usually repeated by people that probably have never used it for a prolonged period of time.
Companies usually didn't roll out that one, so enterprisey experience base isn't that solid at all.
Having used and tinkered with Vista for a year at home with XP for being the standard at work for almost a decade now, I feel someway qualified to say that it didn't seem it wasn't even half the abomination it was declared to be.
Vista was not a stroke of genius, not incredibly fast, but it wa
Re:Cleanup (Score:5, Insightful)
Would this "jump" be any smaller going from XP to Ubuntu? Which also means getting rid of complex to administer software licence systems, EULAs, CALs, etc, etc.
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>>>I feel someway qualified to say that it didn't seem it wasn't even half the abomination it was declared to be.
Try running a brand new PC that you just bought, but only came with 1/2 gig of RAM because Microsoft said that's all Vista needs. It runs so slow you'll think there's a Pentium 1 (~200 megahertz) under the hood instead of a 3000 megahertz processor.
Although I later upgraded that PC to 1.5 gig, it still ran pretty poorly compared to my older XP machine.
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As IE6 is absolutely not available on any new version of Windows
I'm running IE 6 on Windows 7. (Not because I want to) IE 6 is still available from Microsoft on MSDN and other channels. What I want to know is are we going to see the same thing with Corporate IT writing for IE9 and not web standards so in a few years we'll still be hacking sites to work on IE. I do a lot of testing in IE 8 and I've been playing with IE 9. Compared to current releases of, well, pretty much every browser IE still sucks, and sucks badly.
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I don't see how upgrading from XP to Vista/Win 7 is a "major undertaking". The only problems I'd expect are related to specific customizations in a given deployment, and to old applications. It is a slightly bigger undertaking when you have a mixed environment with Samba-based domain server(s) and Windows clients, but even then a very part time admin like myself could figure it out in about a day (with some gnashing of teeth).
PS. Forget Win 7 with RHEL 5's Samba: you have to get newest samba instead.
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It may well be the case that the very new is actually a worst choice. The so called "bathtub curve" can be applicable to software. Even in cases where the supplier hasn't "sold" what is to all intents and purposes a badly tested "beta".
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Wrong. Only ratios of quantities of the same type are unit-less. For example, the ratio of distance covered and time needed, also known as speed, very clearly has an unit.
Of course in this case we have units of the same type (namely mass), so the ratio is, indeed, just a number.
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Uh.. It's the UK. The units are clearly *not* the same type: ounces are mass, but pounds are money!
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but I thought time was money and money was power. But the British pound has no power.
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An ounce is a unit of weight, not mass.
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Ounces are not mass anymore, unless you go to one of the two last backward countries on Earth that still have them.
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What's that in deci-Bels?
Re:Cleanup (Score:4, Informative)
XPSP2 was not a browser upgrade.
Either way, no one is forcing the IT department to stay at the bleeding edge. It may be profitable to do so, because usually, newer systems have some perks the older ones did not. But staying half a decade behind on current issues is not prudent, but paranoid.
That doesn't apply to real-time systems, systems of major criticality and systems with human lives at stake, but for regular office systems, holding back on upgrades forever is not prudent but complacent and possibly paranoid. Some day in the future, even Big Bank, SCADA and mission control systems WILL need to be upgraded. How will paranoid IT departments handle *that* if they never dared to upgrade even a single notebook in the least important offices? How will they gain any experience with the new stuff?
We all like to rave about prudence and ultra-mission-criticality of our IT, but unless we're working for NASA, NORAD, Big Bank or Big Energy SCADA, it's self-aggrandizing paranoia to think upgrading from IE6 to IE8 will bring the enterprise down, financially or otherwise.
Reading Comprehension? (Score:5, Informative)
And:
Does make one wonder if the submitter or the editor even read it.
Re:Reading Comprehension? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if you have read it. Here's the complete paragraph from which you quoted one (partial) sentence (emphasis by me; the first emphasized sentence is the one you quoted):
It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users. To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users.
So it's quite clear that they are not upgrading IE versions.
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Still I don't understand how works the mind of people who believe that government should depend on software they don't have the source of, they didn't compile themselves, they didn't audited, and that comes from a company that has many interest on spying on them.
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Re: (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.
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They do NOT go to the lowest priced vendor, since the lowest priced vendor charges 0, and they took instead one that takes nearly as much as the hardware costs.
Hiring fewer more skilled admins rather than a horde of MCSEs would be financially beneficial as well.
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In that case they need to admit that a foreign company has the ability to plant spy ware in their systems. Your military, foreign relations, trade systems are no longer secret.
They also need to evaluate and compile each piece of software (operating system component, library, app) only once.
Spreading this cost out over all public sector employees with a PC would make it extremely low. They should also require its use by private sector employees handling confidential government data. It could also be availab
Oh, here's the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The German and French governments have started to encourage people to upgrade away from the browser Internet Explorer 6
Heh, can't start copying the French and Germans now, can we? Next thing you know we'll be on the Euro! That killed it right there. Made it politically unfeasible. All those petition signers are stupid francophiles.
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You know Firefox has an en-gb version, I'll bet the French and Germans aren't using that one...
UK Gov won't go past IE6, but MasterCard need IE8? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I have yet to come across a site from which I could not purchase using Firefox.
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IE8 is a standard. Microsoft making it pretty much makes it so.
IE8 has perhaps 20-30% market share currently, and it is about to be superseded. Not to be sniffed at, granted, but not enough to give it much weight as a de facto standard.
Even if you lump all versions of IE together (which from a web design standpoint you can't), its days of market-dominating influence are long gone.
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Accurate stats aren't available but estimates put IE (all version) at between 43% and 63% of users.
That sounds about right, but don't forget that there is much more of a difference coding for IE6 versus IE7 than between (say) Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 4.0. For some purposes it makes sense to lump all versions of IE together, for others it doesn't.
So I'm not sure if I agree with your or not. That sort of share does mean you're obliged to consider Microsoft as some sort of alternative standard if you're a web developer, even if it doesn't mean that everyone else is forced to implement Microsoft's bugs.
There are two thresholds: the point at which you have to allow for Microsoft bugs, and the point at which you can rely on Microsoft bugs. We're above the first threshold still (for IE8 at least, maybe not IE6 any more), but for most purposes fell below the secon
it shouldn't cost anything (Score:2)
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"Unless you use old ActiveX programs that don't support newer versions of IE, that is."
And if you are , then you DESERVE to get infected.
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That's like saying that there is no point in putting off retirement, because you can't work forever.
If they delay spending millions of dollars for one year, then that is a net savings for the company. A million dollars next year is cheaper than a million dollars this year.
Plus, maybe during that year a few more IE6-only apps get retired, and as a result the upgrade just gets that much easier.
We run into this kind of problem all the time at work. Imagine that you buy a $500k machine 5 years ago. It is run
Re:it shouldn't cost anything (Score:5, Insightful)
With that said it provides a wonderful example of why organisations should avoid proprietary extensions to standards. One day the world will move on and you'll be stuck with an un-integrateable piece of shit platform.
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The cost of the software isn't the issue, it's the cost of delivering your applications on that platform that is the issue.
That thing kinda gets me thinking... Wouldn't it be possible to run ActiveX inside of an IE Frame on top of another browser? Probably not a later version of IE, which is a shame, but it'd be neat if you could migrate the default browser up and then whitelist in all the broken shit to a frame running on the older rendering engine via group policy or something. That'd be nice I think, but from what I've experienced, IE is easier to deploy and manage (at the moment, at least) than any other browser when cons
Dictionary (Score:3, Insightful)
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Their security advisor is probably a Zimbabwean member of Al Qaeda with a deep sympathy for the Taliban due to his Afghan roots - but only since he lost his communist party membership in the USSR when it was abolished.
Besides that, he probably has only the interests of the UK in mind.
Reality: deal with it (Score:5, Informative)
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The truth is that critical applications depend on IE6 to function, and upgrading from IE6 would cause work to stop.
I wasn't aware that you could only have one browser installed on a computer at a time. What's wrong with installing Firefox for 99% of tasks, and also having IE6 available for the obsolete and soon to be extinct tasks that require it?
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I wasn't aware that you could only have one browser installed on a computer at a time. What's wrong with installing Firefox for 99% of tasks, and also having IE6 available for the obsolete and soon to be extinct tasks that require it?
What's wrong is that it costs time and money for the variety of things that go in to supporting and maintaining an additional application. The bean counters would throw a fit at the idea of spending money on two applications that do effectively the same thing.
And thanks to Micr
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What's wrong is that it costs time and money for the variety of things that go in to supporting and maintaining an additional application.
It costs very little time and money to support Firefox. It probably costs a lot more to continue supporting the outdated IE6.
The bean counters would throw a fit at the idea of spending money on two applications that do effectively the same thing.
Well, the bean counters would be wrong. The costs of security vulnerability and help desk support for IE6 most likely outweigh the costs of Firefox deployment by a wide margin.
IE is always installed with Windows.
I didn't think it was even possible to install IE6 with Vista or Windows 7, at least without some serious work-arounds.
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IE6 based web apps are just reaching what they would consider as stable.
Bullshit. Nobody has ever considered those "applications" stable. In any but the most backwards companies, these IE6 web apps are not long for this world. The only companies interested in keeping them around are the companies which are soon to be extinct.
2. Most people don't even know what a browser is, let alone have the ability to choose which is best to use from a security standpoint.
Again, bullshit. Most people do know what a browser is. There are a few people around (like the elderly) who don't understand the concept. But those who don't won't be in a job for much longer.
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"Most people do know what a browser is."
Yeah - it is that funny word the 'IT' guy mumbles when he tells me in that frustrated voice to click on the blue 'E'. I have no idea why he thinks I should have been able to figure this out myself, that blue 'E' thing was clear over on the other side of the screen. How was I supposed to know what to do! And I wish he would point at the desk instead of the screen when he is talking about the desktop. That is just so confusing!!!
Note: in RL I am that 'IT' guy. This mi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> Most people do know what a browser is.
Many don't even know what software is (though they will glibly assert that they know all about "technology" because they are adept with their 'pods).
> There are a few people around (like the elderly) who don't understand the concept.
Some of the elderly admit that they know little about computers. This puts them ahead of those who know a whole lot that isn't true.
Re:Reality: deal with it (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why as part of your upgrade you upgrade / fix those apps to work on a modern browser, the alternative is you come to day when you can't upgrade anything in your IT ecology due to everything being so brittle.
Another way of looking at things is that as IE6 gets dropped from supported browser lists over the next few years you can be faced with the situation of critical app a stuck with IE 6 but critical app b needing to be upgraded but because it has dropped support for IE 6 you can't without incurring massive project costs.
Not keeping your software at least to supported versions is a false economy, much like the money you save not putting oil in your car, that is of course until the engine seizes.
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Blame Microsoft, their ruthless tactics led to that situation.
Fool me once: shame on you.
Fool me twice...
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No, blame incompetent IT departments. Back when those kinds of apps were being built, the prevailing attitude in these kinds of places was that cross-browser compatibility was unnecessary for intranet applications. People like myself always loudly pointed out that relying on proprietary Internet Explorer 6-only code would lock them into a single vendor and cause problems if Microsoft ever moved f
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> Blame Microsoft, their ruthless tactics led to that situation.
Yes. After all, how could one expect the tiny, helpless little British government to resist the power of the mighty Microsoft?
A fully patched IE6? (Score:5, Informative)
IE8 is the patch to IE6.
Myopia (Score:5, Insightful)
The consideration about firewalls and scanners is also right, if your policy is to go on patching a broken roof instead or making proper repairs.
God save the Great Britain (as well as the Little one)!
Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
Sad that something which appears so trivial turns out to be expensive.
Stephan
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Why is it so dddddangerous?
You say that with sarcasm, but in reality it's not dangerous to me or any of the other end users. But it is dangerous to your career when you gloriously fuck up the ability for all the employees to use systems they depend on daily.
If you're asking "why does this need testing", when talking about a fundamental change to an underlying application, then you should not be working in IT.
Yes sad indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Too expensive? Pah. (Score:3, Informative)
The only "expensive" bit was a day of my time fixing issues with some rubbishy Java applet that is used in the library, which isn't very happy with IE8. A day of my time is worth £40, so it wasn't exactly expensive to fix!
If a school can do it, I'm sure government departments can too.
Re:Too expensive? Pah. (Score:4, Insightful)
most of the large ukgov departments have outsourced their IT support to companies like HP, Fujitsu, Logica, Capita and so on. Due to the ukgov ineptitude of writing good outsource contracts - an IE upgrade is off plan and so the outsourcer (in a monopoly position at that department) simply charge the earth - even if it is just to roll out an update automatically. Excuses such as testing, and verification of intranet applications simply make the cost even higher
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Usually those support contracts contain clauses that cost the support provider money if your computers go down because they miss something in the upgrade.
That means that if you want them to push out an upgrade, you need to pay them to test all your apps, or waive their liability if you have a big mess.
All that cost is risk-aversion, and depending on your industry/etc it may actually be money well spent.
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Definitely. Imagine 1700 users eager to break out of the firewall, eager to get to places they shouldn't do and to install programs that they're not allowed. At least government departments don't generally have people working in them who'd do anything to install crapware from the Net! That's not including the 100 or so teachers and 100 support staff, some of whom would (and indeed did, until we blocked it) install anything they f
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At least government departments don't generally have people working in them who'd do anything to install crapware from the Net!
I don't work in government, but from what I've seen users are users regardless of occupation. Non-tech users rarely read popups, and install whatever blinks and looks shiny. Technical users are always sure THEY have a reason to circumvent your firewall and application policies, if only because they can.
From what I've seen in the enterprise sector though (I work for one of the global fortune-500 corporations, and I daily see their it-struggles) , I suspect there may be a LOT of 3d-party "web-apps" that isn't
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Oh, I forgot to mention. I don't want to defend the "too expensive" argument. It definately IS expensive, but that's just due to lacking diligence previously, accepting sub-standard quality applications into your organization.
Many IT-admins either don't care, don't know, or fails to explain to stake-holders why crappy odd-ball software, even though it "works" is a really bad idea in the long run.
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That can be a very hard case to make when that "odd ball" software has 80% of the market share in its domain and has a feature list quadruple that of its nearest competitor.
Keep in mind that software compatibility isn't very high on the list of features the people who make purchasing decisions are concerned with. If that odd ball software allows the business to lay off 50 employees due to productivity improvements, then IT will be asked to support it.
Actually, most likely IT will just refuse to support it,
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...then IT will be asked to support it.
Yes, and it's the job of IT to do an long-term impact analysis, and explain it to procurement. If the estimated long-term impact (for instance, staying on older, less productive and less safe browsers for longer time, requiring extra support staff, etc.), is still outweighed by the positive effect of using the "odd ball" software, then the software should obviously be used. The point is that the "odd-ball-software upgrade" should be budgeted a couple of years away, and "no, it's too expensive to upgrade re
Launching boldly into last week (Score:2)
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 UK government stood on the brink of upgrading to last week's technology and decided this modern technology thing was moving WAY too fast.
*Dropping* IE6 is too expensive? (Score:2)
When free isn't free (Score:3, Insightful)
On the surface, IE6 is free as is IE7 and IE8. So why would it be "expensive" to upgrade? Oh yeah... the man-hours spent and the applications that depend on IE6 are also considerations to make. Hrmmm... This is just the first thought in the realization that not adhering to open standards could be a costly mistake and that vendor lock-in, even one as large and ubiquitous as Microsoft, can lead to an extremely costly future.
I wonder, then, if the UK Government will start to reach a conclusion similar to the London Stock Exchange with regard to Microsoft. While the reason to switch would be quite different, the general reason would be about the same -- "staying with this vendor can, has and will lead to disaster." Moving forward, using open standards that multiple vendors can participate in will lead to a more flexible situation where, once again, the decisions about where to go next is not in the hands of the vendor.
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Oh wait.
Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. (Score:4, Informative)
Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. If they stop using IE6. They start losing 1 million dollars a day. Thats the reality of the situation.
Except it's nothing like reality. They *only* lose 1 million dollars a day if they stop using IE6 *and then don't use anything else*.
Here's a car analogy. Using a Mercedes Vito van makes me a certain quantity of thousands of pounds per year (I'm British, we don't disclose ages or wages). So, if I stop using a Merc, I stop earning money, right? Wrong. If I stop using a Mercedes Vito, I start using a Citroën Berlingo, or a Ford Transit, or some similar van.
It's really a pretty simple idea.
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If I earned a million bucks a day by using IE6, I would sure as Hell put half a million aside for upgrading to the next version of that browser or even migrate to a browser I can upgrade independently from the core operating system.
Eating all you earn and not planning one or two years ahead is a mistake that even in prehistoric times happened only once per tribe.
Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a bit of a mantra when I talk about IE6. Whenever anyone asks me why anyone would run IE6, I give this response:
Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. If they stop using IE6. They start losing 1 million dollars a day. Thats the reality of the situation.
That's about the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard. If this is your mantra, then you should not be employed anywhere, for any job.
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That is only nonsensical if it is being supportive of the reality. The reality is unfortunate and stupid: I
Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's about the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard. If this is your mantra, then you should not be employed anywhere, for any job.
Yet your post is one sided at best and naive at worst. If your company has 30000 employees who use tools that they quite heavily depend on that only runs on one particular application and you push out and update because "hahah I'm IT and I make the rules" which breaks everything then YOU should not be employed anywhere.
... when everything is working.
IT is an internal service. If IT just focuses on the enterprise (security, stability etc) at the expense of usability then the IT department should be dissolved and rebuilt (the reverse is also true). You the admin may push an update to IE6 to my computer once you have replaced all, and I mean ALL of the applications that depend on it, and in the fortune 50 company I work for that's actually a lot of web based applications. How you do it, and who funds it is none of my concern. This is a discussion for your department to make with upper management.
Don't forget, users are a nice and quiet bunch of people
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Yet your post is one sided at best and naive at worst. If your company has 30000 employees who use tools that they quite heavily depend on that only runs on one particular application and you push out and update because "hahah I'm IT and I make the rules" which breaks everything then YOU should not be employed anywhere.
How does deploying Firefox remove the ability to run IE6?
IT is an internal service. If IT just focuses on the enterprise (security, stability etc) at the expense of usability then the IT department should be dissolved and rebuilt
What the hell does IE6 have to do with usability? If you'ev ever used any of these IE6 based web "applications" you would know that they are the least usable products on the market.
Don't forget, users are a nice and quiet bunch of people ... when everything is working.
Again, how does installing Firefox stop things from working?
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Assume they are now using IE 7 which hasn't been dropped or going to be dropped in the supported list of browsers by many vendors in 2010 and they can earn 1.5 million pounds a day! A silly figure but then your argument only makes sense if people switch from IE6 to nothing.
IE 6 has an increasing opportunity cost associated with its continued use over time not to mention that it dramatically increases any software development cost of any project that has to support it AND modern browsers i.e. external facing
Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. (Score:4, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense [wikipedia.org]
Re:Assume IE 6 earns them 1 million dollars a day. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the tech details are just pushing a .MSI file out with IE8, or just approving it from a WSUS server.
My rant: IE6 is 10 year old technology. A Web browser is on the front lines of keeping a machine secure, almost as much so as a router. IE6 is meant to deal with spyware from the year 2001. Not the botnets and SCADA-seeking malware of 2010. Anyone who has any sense can see this.
There is just no reason to run IE6 on XP unless it is testing backlevel versions. IE8 fixes a lot of security issues. Even Windows XP needs to be binned because it is going to be a decade old, and organizations need to move forward to operating systems more able to handle the security issues of this decade.
This doesn't even need a car example, but a war example: You don't send out Greek phalanxes in formation against people with 10,000 rpm chainguns, Apache helicopters, and flamethrowers. Fielding Windows XP is doing just this.
The blackhats, phishers, scammers, spammers, criminals, and other miscreants are not going to be easing up attacks anytime soon. So why deal with threats of 2010 with an OS made nine years ago?
Of course, firewalls mitigate this, but there is something sort of wrong with compensating for a poor OS's security by having to fortify the router and perimeter instead of having the OS be reliable enough so a blackhat isn't home free once they get into the core network fabric.
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There are many companies that have these problems, they have their intranet stuff like registration of hours, personnel phonebook, documentation server, etc. All of these intranet websites have been bought from different companies, and they haven't upgraded these sites and some of these companies no longer exist. All these websites don't work with
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The blackhats, phishers, scammers, spammers, criminals, and other miscreants are not going to be easing up attacks anytime soon. So why deal with threats of 2010 with an OS made nine years ago?
You seem confused a little. The marketing/branding event "Windows XP" happened 9 years ago, yes. But the last time Microsoft updated Windows XP was few days ago, and they update it for today's threats, not those from 9 years ago.
Do you remember we had SP1, SP2 and SP3? SP2 was six years ago, pretty big update. SP3 is from only two years ago.
Of course, Windows Vista/7 can be more secure in some select scenarios, due to some select features it introduced. It's not as black as white as you want it to be.
P.S. G
Re: (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:Frosty Pizzo? (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox plugins leave Opera's configurability in the dust.
Chrome's interface is cleaner and more compact.
Only mobile and cli browsers score lower on Acid3.
Everything else runs circles around IE's rendering times.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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
Re: (Score:2)
Reloading part of the page is fine, it's just that the dolt has no clue as to how to make it interoperate with the back button.
Re:Frosty Pizzo? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it doesn't support rounded corners, but now that all the major crap has been fixed, I'll do my rounded corners with a few css background: (url://foo.com/round.png) and call it good.
I can now do web sites entirely within linux, boot a laptop temporarily into windows, and guess what - it WORKS.
I don't need any browser sniffing, any shims, any of the crap that people have been using for years. xmlhttprequest is the same object across all browsers now so no checking for different methods for creating a new one.
THAT is what we've been asking for for a decade.
Now as for this:
Nobody is forced - you can always give them a separate url with a fugly site and tell them that it's to partition off the insecure users of IE6. Bring along a laptop to show them what they're missing. Tell them they don't have to upgrade from IE6 - they can always use Opera or Forefox in addition ... it's not a binary either-or choice.
After all, a fully-patched system is also just as safe for Firefox or Opera as it is for IE6. Or don't they really believe that their systems are secure, and it's just hand-waving.
I ran into a $16 billion company Thursday that still is on IE6. Will I change anything so my product works with them? No - its chasing the tail of the market. At some point in the next year or two they're going to have to upgrade anyway.
The last boss who insisted on pixel-perfect IE6 compatibility stopped complaining all of a sudden when his favorite porn site (or was it his favorite poker site) forced the upgrade issue. If you believe that people's reasons for not upgrading are based on logic or economics, you're mistaken. Those are justifications or excuses, but the real reason is inertia (or they would have switched to Firefox or Opera long ago).
Re: (Score:2)
90% of everything is terrible.
Except Ivan.
Re: (Score:2)
And what about your increasing opportunity cost with using an increasingly vendor unsupported browser?
You do know that supporting IE 6 in modern web applications is very expensive as can take up 50% + of developers time on workarounds? So having to support your internal population as well as your external user base increases the costs of any external facing web sites you do.
Re: (Score:2)
What are you going to do in less than four years time when XP support is completely removed by Microsoft then? I would suggest that having all internal web applications not be tied to a specific version of Windows and/or IE would be a good starting point in planning your migration from XP.
If you bury your head in the sand then in three years time there will be a major panic and you will have to do something.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of government computers still run NT4, so I think they have an answer to that question.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh right, for some reason it's seems to be an impossible task to develop suitable Government IT systems for any government even though companies seem to do it everyday.
Don't underestimate the stupidity of (large) companies.
Re: (Score:2)
Big X has a high failure rate when it comes to IT projects, with X being any lumbering beast of an enterprise, office or agency.
They want standardization, homogeneity and identical software tools and IT workplaces for not one office, one city, one branch but the entire multinational group of companies.
Any project involving more than 300 clients is hard or ridiculously expensive. Projects trying to make a one-size-fits-all tool for 100.000 employees of a multinational corporation or agency is financial suici
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can always save some bucks by postponing that oil change in your car. Until you have to change the entire engine because of that.