Less than PEACH-y: UK's plant export IT system only works with Internet Explorer A key British border IT system used by plant and seed exporters is so ancient that it will only work with Internet Explorer – which was deprecated by Microsoft last year and is used by relatively few people. The snappily named Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) says horticultural companies moving …
Unfortunately large scale ERP systems tend to be by the Oracle's/SAPs/Microsoft's of
world. To make a big ERP system that works usually needs the staffing level of these sort of companies.
Auditors are often choose as a status thing, as it if you don't use one of the big four you are a small.company in your market place.
Doesn't make it right but that is the way of the world.
Not necessarily...
We have a stock control system that was written years ago in some version of ASP that will run in IE11 but not Edge because IE11 drops back to 'IE5 Quirks mode' but Edge's IE Mode doesn't seem to go back that far.
Why hasn't it been upgraded? The M word... too few users, so who gets to put their hands in their incredibly deep pockets
That and the fact that if we shout too loud we are liable to 'migrated' to the main warehouse stock control system... great(relatively!?!) for shifting boxes from goods-in to goods-out but crap when you are taking boxes of generic parts and shipping them out assembled as custom builds
I don't disagree, but while it's necessary, it's not always sufficient.
Open Standards can be written by corporate entities, too. Case in point, in its time, IE4 was the most standard-compliant browser, mostly because MS had started working hard with the W3C, and giving them suggestions. In the meantime, Netscape, intoxicated by its near complete dominance of the browser market, was going its own way and losing it.
Chromium can be open-source, and the standard open, if Google is the one deciding what the standard is, they will make life very difficult for any would-be competitor.
Open Standards can be written by corporate entities, too. Case in point, in its time, IE4 was the most standard-compliant browser, mostly because MS had started working hard with the W3C, and giving them suggestions. In the meantime, Netscape, intoxicated by its near complete dominance of the browser market, was going its own way and losing it.
Having quickly looked at the tutorial videos which just consist of form filling and validation, it should have been literally impossible to fuck this up in 2001 when IE6 was launched, but whoever did this website managed it.
No matter, PEACH will be phased out and a new system introduced later this year, which will probably be Chrome only.
The company in the US has been struggling for several years to port their Silverlight implementation to something much more modern: Angular.
Needles to say, the conversion from one old/dead/rotten technology to something in the throws hasn't been going well.
This gives me an idea for a mean prank: gently suggest implementing the Silverlight VM atop JavaScript so the old code can continue to be used as-is. Try to make someone really important think it was their idea rather than yours, just in case of fallout.
Sorry I'm so late at looking at responses to my lame responses.
However, your idea makes me think that this would actually be a great little project for the budding JS developer. A Silverlight emulator in JS. Just think of the market (or don't).
"Anyone using it after that date is on their own as far as security and usability upgrades go – and even at the time we noted that just 1 per cent of web users were surfing the information superhighway's subterranean clouds through IE11, everyone else being on full-fat Google Chrome or diet Microsoft Chrome. Sorry, we mean Windows 10's default browser Edge."
*ahem*
we're still just about here, you know...
"Just do it."
Yup, on the whole FF works perfectly well for me. Even when I have three instances of the browser running with dozens of tabs in each it seems to run perfectly well on my fairly average laptop.
Though a few sites don't work nicely with it, in which case I use Brave or Pale Moon, v occasionally MS Edge. Any suggestions for other web browsers to try?
It is if you want it! https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/?q=Welsh
I'm guessing from your name that you might just be someone who can benefit from this. I wonder how many of you there are...
Apparently there are around 884 000 people who speak Welsh (29.2% of the population of Wales). This is around 0.01% of the world's population. A fairly recent estimate put the proportion of people in the world with internet access at around 56.7%. However, in Wales, that figure is more like 89%. StatCounter recently estimated that FF's market share is about 3.66%.
884 000 × 89% × 3.66% = 28 795 people who can speak Welsh who also use Firefox (very approximately)
I have to say, that's more than I expected. Now, as to how many of them are just using it in English anyway, that's a different query.
SELECT People FROM Wales WHERE CONTAINS(Languages, 'Welsh') AND UseInternet=True AND Browser='Firefox' AND BrowserLanguage='Welsh';
I'm not sure your statistical analysis is on point. I believe Firefox supports Klingon. KDE (and I'm sure all other open source ecosystems) has a translate project so if you were so inclined you could add Welsh, Cornish, Erse, Breton (no-one has as far as I can see but there are two dialects of Norwegian and something called interlingua)
That;s the point. If you want it you can have it.
In a former life I was involved in a small way with agriculture and had some dealings with ADAS - as that was what was later morphed into DEFRA by government edict. The ADAS advice service was free to farmers and growers as it was seen as promoting the common good.
When it was rebadged as DEFRA it was no longer free and had to become 'self financing' and the upheaval caused many problems. (eg the set-aside payments fiasco).
At the time I remember the previous ADAS employees had the new DEFRA acronym as:
'Dont Ever F***ing Reorganise us Again.
I used to have problems installing Quickbooks for clients (I HATE Quickbooks) which needed IE5 (or some such version) to work but IE7 was out and so everything would crash and workarounds were needed. So, I’d wonder-why would ANY program tie itself to a browser much less a SPECIFIC version of a browser in order to work? I thought it was short sighted in the extreme. Could someone explain this? Thanks
All browsers implement the HTML spec differently. Even different versions of the same browser, especially if that borwser is IE.
If you tie your code to supporting 1 version of 1 browser then that is all you have to support not multiple versions of multiple browsers so it is much simpler. Or you could pay more and hire competent devs. We're lucky they don't say "works only on IE5 on MacOS 10.4" or something like that.
The most common IE6 dependency I've seen (and it's been a while, honestly) is reliance on "doing the right thing" with sloppy, malformed HTML. This is easy to fix. The thing that's hard to fix, on the other hand, is anything that used VBscript instead of JavaScript. It's not that the languages are so utterly different - they're both procedural languages - but it seemed like tons of undocumented business logic always lurked in the VBscript which in turn seems to have been lifted out of old Excel spreadsheet macros that may or may not have been right when they were first written. By now, the authors of those steaming piles are most likely retired if not expired.
Icon because "what a steaming pile... I'll just be on my way now".
Hahahaha.
It will probably have been pen tested but in my experience that doesn't necessarily find all issues with that kind of codebase. There will be out of date dependencies with flaws, it probably relies on an ancient version of ASP.Net (or worse plain old classic ASP) and you don't want to think about what a mess the code is in.
(I have some experience working on NHS & uk.gov systems most of which I wouldn't trust to handle my coffee budget let alone billions of pounds.)
Just another foray into dependency hell.
Really, given that there are 70s systems and code widely used should we be surprised anymore? Admittedly keeping those working usually a lot easier because of standard libraries and stable platforms.
In other news, civil service IT is expensive and ineffective. Yep, I’ve heard that one a lot too.
You'd think that if HM Government could produce all this back end stuff that they'd sponsor a browser that they know works with that backend. It doesn't have to be written from the ground up but it does need to be a generic browser that doesn't get updated / change version at the whim of a supplier. After all, a lot of the behaviour of the browser isn't about rendering pages but providing 'analytics' in that never ending tail chase to figure out what a user does with their spare time (and cash).
It doesn't have to look pretty, it just has to work (and it doesn't need to render properly on phones, watches or anything like that)(not that present browsers do, anyway).
Also security fixes forever.
That's the real problem. They almost certainly aren't keeping up with applying security patches to the normal systems where you only have to run an installer, so asking them to apply a patch, compile it, test it works, fix the stuff the patch broke is just way too much.
Better to spend the effort on the actual "web apps", making them secure and standards compliant so anyone can use them with Chrome or Safari.
I remember when we had a supplier who had one system that would only run properly on IE6. There came a time (probably around 12 years ago maybe more) when our security policies dictated that IE6 was strictly forbidden. Now this security policy was informed by certain standards we legally had to comply with so there was simply no getting round it. We'd tried later versions of IE running in compatibility mode and it was no good. There were one or two things you simply could not do with anything other than IE6.
This supplier was a certain telecoms company. Big one, you'll know them, almost a monopoly in some senses. We didn't really have any choice other than to use them and they simply weren't interested in our predicament. Yes they acknowledged the problem. but they would not do any more than assure us that it would be fixed in a future version. It would they promised work with later versions of IE and also on Firefox, even that new fangled Chrome thing. But, they tried to excuse themselves, they did not develop the system. It was a third party system they used and they were reliant on the third party.
No amount of escalations could change things. So our senior management instructed us to keep a laptop with IE6 in a locked cupboard and get it out only when we needed to use this system. This was usually at least once a day. Domain policies were such that we had to run this laptop on a "test" DIA ADSL circuit we had in the corner of the office.
"Almost all major browsers nowadays are built on Google's Chromium engine"??!
By Toutatis!
«The web is entirely occupied by the oppressors. Well, not entirely… One small village of indomitable netizens still holds out against the invaders.»
Fireferix and Safarix would like some words with you about that… If you're suitably repentant, they perhaps might not plant a menhir somewhere where it would hurt you to dig it out! Paf!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
