Death of IE6 still greatly exaggerated, says browser hit squad Internet Explorer 6 dead? In your dreams, Microsoft, in your dreams. Redmond broke out the dancing shoes and did a twirl on IE6's grave in January, citing data that showed its once-celebrated, now-hated browser had slipped below 1 per cent US market share. The decline followed some determined pushing by, of all people, …
Some companies will never update, just as some are still using mainframe systems. They will have to live with the repercussions of that decision. The decision being to become reliant on cowboy coder products that were designed only to work in IE6.
I have been a web dev long enough to know that coding for IE6 only is an intentional decision made to increase support costs and is highly unethical. Any company fool enough to employ developers bad enough to do that deserves what they get.
Or they can suck it up and deal with some change for once.
Many of these IE6-only applications are probably legacy systems that were written at a time when IE6 dominated the market. It was only when standards-compliant browsers were more widespread that it really became clear that applications written for IE6 were not portable.
I doubt that there are many cowboy developers who create bad or non-portable code with an eye to future support work. All the developers I know dislike support work, hate supporting old code, and utterly detest working on code designed for an obsolete platform.
"One problem: the aforementioned data, gathered by Net Applications, counts browsers running on Joe Netizen's PC. It doesn't count enterprise users."
That's open to several readings, one of which is "this data counts internet usage, not intranet usage". But it does not matter if people are still using IE6-based applications on an intranet. What matters is that they use use a different browser to surf the web.
That "different browser" can't be a later version of IE but every other browser *can* be installed side-by-side with IE6 so actually that's Microsoft's problem not the corporates'. Having installed a different browser, enforcement of its use is probably also something that a competent corporate admin can enforce and, on the Net Applications evidence, they are doing so.
So the bottom lines are:
IE6's share of the *browser* market is below 1%.
It is safe for web page authors to drop all support for IE6.
but it certainly isn't from a security perspective, and developers at various levels taking that attitude is precisely why security is the mess that it is.
So long as the IE6 code is present on the machine it represents a security threat. Yes, the primary threat is to the recalcitrant Windows XP user, but as DDOS and other distributed attacks have proven, there are secondary effects even if you are running a more secure system yourself.
A decade ago I argued that we should not build IE6 specific web sites at work. I lost, apparently there was no other browser to support and it was easier to just do IE6. Now it's all panic as corporate don't know what to do now that they backed themselves into a tight space they don't want to be in.
I'm in a different department now and I can't hear their screams...
Unfortunately the smug feeling of knowing I was right won't compensate for the cost of the company digging it's self out the mess it got into, against expert advice.
How much money has been saved over the 10 years by not making the internal web apps support many ill-defined fast moving standard that no browser kept to at the time?
How much greater was the users productivity by having a better UI by making use of IE6?
(10 years ago, it was sensible in lots of cases just to support IE6, the problem are the corporations that have not upgraded their web apps in the meantime. I don’t believe that a HTML 5 app written today will work in 10 years’ time without issues due to changes that always happen to the web)
HTML hasn't been moving very fast. Ill defined, I wouldn't think so. "Embrace and extend" was invented a few years before IE but it was used for the exact purpose of cornering the market and lock in developers and users of such sites; a common enough business practice, might or might not be liked by the user. Apparently they don't like it any more.
Seven to 10 years ago I would have leaned that way. But some of these apps were being developed 12-15 years ago and there weren't any obviously superior choices. And those are the ones with the highest and most complicated transitions. The expectation was that MS would migrate the necessary functionality as they moved to newer versions of the software. The reality was that the very functionality that made it possible to build the apps was also at the heart of the security vulnerabilities for Windows. And as we now know, building secure apps is even more expensive than building modular apps that work with standards compliant technology.
I disagree. When IE6 was new, it offered some pretty cool (to a nerd) possibilities which were not available in other browsers, or or would require a lot more work when nobody would dream of not using IE in enterprise.
It's been too long to be authoritative but examples like interop with Excel spring to mind - being able to actually open Excel inside a web-page. I'm sure there are others too. Us coders love to use fancy new APIs that do "something cool".
And, @BigYin... grownups talking. Don't embarrass yourself talking about 'proper browsers'
What, apart perhaps from XmlHttpRequest, did IE 6 give us? As a browser it was shit from the word go, though hardly anyone noticed as Mozilla went down the dark and blind alley of XUL.
Back then it was generally considered among the developers I worked with to be bad practice to do IE 6 only work. The legacy crap (SAP, Siebel, etc.) that we're still dealing with should never have been written as websites. It was done because of the hype but was broken by design because it was IE and MS Windows specific. No point in wasting browser runtime in that context.
ActiveX and thus IE was a requirement in countries like Korea which were not allowed 128-bit encryption until the export restrictions were relaxed. This explains the relatively high percentage of IE in some countries: retooling is essential but expensive.
Where IE, warts and all, did play a big part was when developers wanted to include browser functionality in their Windows deskop program. Perfectly legitimate decision assuming you can swap the component out for cross-platform development or just to keep in step with the MFC or later .NET CLR releases. Adobe did this with the help system.
Make it a "World War II Japanese Insular soldier that was dug in deep for 30 years after the war was over". There fixed it for you.
Like the soldier, the supply lines were cut off, and he was not informed that the war was lost and that he should surrender arms.
This is a prime example of how Microsoft's monopoly is harming technological advancement of the human race.
The fact that corporations are locked into using this hideous browser is because websites were not designed with open standards in mind - who's fault is this........ (the reason that people are trapped into using i.e 6 is outlined in the policy document - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents - i.e using their monopoly to prevent innovation)
Its worse when you consider that every tax payer funds MS and they use our funding to try to restrict competition using unfair (and occasionally illegal) methods.
They may have had a better product in the mid 90's when they gained their monopolist position - since then they put more effort into preventing competition (and thus attacking the ability for mankind to advance technologically)
If anyone here is to say ' they have changed now' - they have NOT
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/11/barnes-noble-microsoft-using-patents-to-cripple-android-competition.ars
You're complaining about a problem that to me, seems endemic of the IT industry. You only need to do a search for Apple sue Samsung to find that it's not just Microsoft that are doing such things. The IT industry has bigger problems than Microsoft these days.
Also, how are US citizens funding Microsoft? I'd quite like to see some evidence of that please.
So, a company which earns revenue by providing compatibility services for old browsers is providing 'data' which says that everywhere is still using 80% IE6 in the environment. Why exactly would anyone trust them on that? They are hardly going to say "nobody uses IE6 anymore, don't buy our product!", are they?
Quite likely 80% of their customers still have IE6. But then that's pretty much stating the obvious, given the nature of their business.
Unconvinced.
I would trust them on it because they make money by providing services to customers who are (or think they are) stuck with IE6 for various reasons. Why would they lie about their potential customer base? Exaggerating the figures isn't going to magic more customers into existence for them.
More likely they only wanted to use the media to promote themselves, presumably in the hope that there are still a few more managers out there pooping a lung over the IE6 dependency they need to deal with.
Google *does* block* browsers earlier than IE8 on most of their web-apps (although notably not search). Didn't make much difference to *our* corporate IT, and we're an IT firm, so I doubt it would make much difference to t'others.
On IE8 finally now that they've managed to upgrade the intranet app that was reliant on IE6/7 but I feel for those less fortunate.
Not sure why the firms can't run IE6 for their intranet and install Firefox or whatever as a secondary browser for internet (with appropriate group policy settings) but I'm no expert.
(* Well, make their sites look rubbish and pop up a warning recommending an upgrade anyway, which is a bit like a block)
We block facebook and youtube and all the google stuff except search anyway, and I don't supose we are the only large organisation to do so. When you regularly get FOI requests on users browser habits from journos on a fishing expedition you make damn sure the stats don't come up with too many hits on stuff you don't want to see in the local paper...
or the availability of alternate browsers. It is that they have some app, probably developed internally back in the dark ages when programs could do hex calculations in their heads, which is now business critical and doesn't run on anything newer. I hated those issues when we were trying to migrate from IE6 to IE7 and IE8 was now the preferred MS platform and conforming to most standards. Although there are notable commercial exceptions.
Business critical apps written in Oracle Forms that rely on specific versions of JInitiator (that are only certified for certain versions of IE). So try to pick a path where server side, client side (+plugins) for multiple line of business apps all get updated independently (because they've all got different development roadmaps) and get us off XP at the same time and don't break anything in the process.
It's a laugh a minute...
a version of Java 5 to support a business critical app. I Sun had pulled support for it two years before I started this job, and I'm getting on toward 3 years here.
Anonymous because the application is one that shouldn't be on something that out of date, and supports information that while you want it to be public at some point, you don't want hacked in the interim. Heap big bad juju waiting there. Heap big.
Most corporate IT would not cave in if the users got locked out of these sites - even Google search. They would just define it as 'not required for the user's job function' and close the support call - even if the user works in a role not understood by anyone in IT.
Yes, it does keep happening to me.....
I'd love to know who plucked 80% out of the air as a statistic (implying to the el reg comments here). Anyone done a survey asking major corp's what their IE policy is? Could be 50%, could be 60%, could be a 1000000%? We don't know. There's an implication that there's a blanket policy for IE6 in these corps? Surely with the tools (AD to boot), they'll upgrade from IE6 where possible (for people who don't need the aging CRMs etc).
Microsoft probably don't care. As long as they don't get screams from the big corp's when the security patches stop coming out.
I'll get the beer out again. I like to quench my first with a pint of cider. Care to join MS to care"less" about IE6.
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