Submitted by BBC News reports: Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a “sophisticated and targeted” cyber attack on the search engine. The firm said from 1 March some of its services, such as Google Docs, would not work “properly” with the browser. It recommended individuals and firms upgrade “as soon as possible”.
Included below is an e-mail that was forwarded to us as part of this news submission by user chrisfriberg.
Dear Google Apps admin,​
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
I think it was safe to say that the attack on Google, woke Google up to the threat of IE on their own systems and they must have done (or are in the process of) an internal review of it’s use. I had not expected them to react publicly so quickly though.
I think this is a good thing. Increasing internal complaints from corporate desktop users should increase the pressure on backwards and incompetent companies to update.
Of course, they’ll want users to upgrade to a browser like Chrome, and it’ll be interesting to see come March and onwards if browser trends see a noticeable uptick, just like Mozilla saw when the German and French governments recommended to users to not use IE6.
Of course, moving users on is good for their security, but will this move developers on too? That remains to be seen.
According to my knowledge there are three set of IE 6 users
(1) Enterprise users who doesn’t have money to upgrade their existing softwares
(2) Home users, who doesn’t know to use Windows Update to keep their computers upto date.
(3) Pirated Windows XP users for whom the latest IE or windows update are not available.
For all of the above three users it is very hard to move them to latest.
Now that Windows 7 is going sucessful in the market, this would encourage them to move to latest windows OS where they get latest IE 8.
Educating users is very difficult.
For people who borrow Windows isn’t it simply just installing Firefox 3.6. You don’t have to use IE6 or any IE. Or just use a secure OS like Linux.
However, in some companies they force everybody to use IE6… kind of silly. Or
Linux is still not ready for home users (non techinical people). Windows & MAC has more & better applications for home users.
I would say as OS (Kernel) Windows & Linux both are secure enough. Only the applications like IE,Firefox,Flash, Adobe PDF reader that runs on these has bugs (security vulnerable).
Basically all software in this world has security bugs but the hacker trys to find only on those that are popular by high usage/users.
Neither is Windows or OS X or any OS really.
Hardly true. But nice trolling, though.
Puhlease, there are several bugs in the windows kernel and the linux kernel and in os x-kernel which can be exploited remotely and/or locally.
A popular claim with no evidence. Today the scammers (not hackers!) are aiming at the non-technical user using social engineering and is no longer aimed at any particular OS, but hits wide with no regard to OS, browser or any other software combination (though of course the high percentage of non-technical users on Windows makes it an indirect target). With older versions of Windows it was targetted because it was the only OS which had the infrastructure required to practically deploy malware with little work.
I tried installing linux to my dad to use daily, he feel windows is fast in launching any UI application and also there no yahoo/live messenger for linux with Video chat support. Also, there is no driver for few devices which are still common usage in countries like India. (like webcam , internal modem -WinModem). I couldn’t make my father use linux for long, after one month he came back to Windows XP and he is happy with Windows XP.
I call bullshit on that one. Your entire post reeks of crap. aMSN has support for webcam and nudge and whatnot. Pretty much any webcam is supported, though it’s true it can be difficult to find the right package.
I can counter with my father using gentoo for years (with me doing the support). It even has support for his usb-modem and webcam. My old webcam also works in linux whereas it was a tad more difficult to get it to work with Windows Server 2008 (x64). I had to use the “wrong” drivers (non-win2k8 drivers).
by ramasubbu_sk on Sat 30th Jan 2010 19:47 UTC in reply to “RE[3]: IE6 Users
I tried installing linux to my dad to use daily, he feel windows is fast in launching any UI application and also there no yahoo/live messenger for linux with Video chat support. Also, there is no driver for few devices which are still common usage in countries like India. (like webcam , internal modem -WinModem). I couldn’t make my father use linux for long, after one month he came back to Windows XP and he is happy with Windows XP.
nice trolling. xp is something from 2001 so it may load faster on a pc compared to a 2009 linux distro. If you want video for yahoo messenger just use gyachi, and for the winmodem, i used dialup “wimodems” on linux years ago
Edited 2010-01-31 10:13 UTC
This is tiresome.
Has it ever occured to you that people don’t want to use Linux?
I’m sure it has, that’s why he gave it as one alternative. Re-read his post.
Yes, but only Microsoft Certified Solitaire Experts (and other variations on click’n’point “sysadmins”) and other non-technical users who’ve been lied to by those certified solitaire experts
Then just be happy with your existing Windows installation, but don’t bitch if an old Windows version is no longer compatible with the latest web browsers.
This is tiresome.
Has it ever occurred to you that people don’t want to use Windows?
(Personally, I can’t stand Windows. It is incredibly hard to maintain and put up with. I do understand your point though, and I know that many people prefer Windows. This, however, is often because they are used to it, but not always. Both Windows and Linux have many faults. Different people prefer one or the other. Be thankful that we have a choice.)
What is tiresome are the FOSS activists who throw hand gernades into EVERY news and blog comment area no matter how unrelated the news or blog item is to the FOSS movement.
I love Linux, Open Source software, and Free Software. However, the activists seriously need to take a day off once in a while.
Hmm…. I dunno…. Pirate Windows or Use Linux…. we all know the right answer. Problem is, a lot of people will take the other one.
You have no idea how expensive porting private intranet to firefox can be!
Who said you can’t keep IE6 for the intranet and install Firefox for the WWW?
You need better developers that use ui frameworks like jquery and know how to write code that doesn’t lock you in as much.
For category number 2, is not necessarily that they don’t know how to use windows update. Ever try running that through dial-up? I would refuse to run it to. A good chunk of the US does not have broadband available yet, and stuck on dial-up, so is expected.
Seconded; Windows Update over dial-up is absolutely horrid. When I visit my in-laws I have to get them to stay off the phone for at least a day while Windows Update chatters back and forth.
A 200MB (or whatever) patch isn’t bad on broadband, but on dial-up it’s absolutely ridiculous.
Insert rant about telecomms companies taking government $$$ to expand broadband networks and then not bothering to actually do the work…
– chrish
IE is free so the enterprise user’s budget is completely irrelevent.
He’s almost certainly referring to “enterprise” software which is written to work with, and will only work with, IE6. Hell I’ve had the pleasure of “enterprise” Java software which only runs on the Microsoft JRE: something that is not only very old, you can’t even get from Microsoft any more.
Do not underestimate the awful quality and cost of a lot of “enterprise” software.
Yup, well said.
Dell ha[[s][d]] this very problem when I was there about four years ago. They were planning on updating the software system, but the word was it was being built on the same old foundations – so IE6 only.
Brilliant people, I swear!
MSCE morons!
–The loon
I would say
(1) Not all of them, they can have some critical system that req IE6 to work.
(2) probably or they use some legacy product or they simply like IE6.
(3) They can use some other browser.
I think they should ban IE6 from Google all services! They should put up a browser ballot when IE users come to their site and soon the 2 and 3 category would be history. 1 category is tricky it can be done but,costs a lot when you have a custom system to modify or replace.
Having down web dev for so long, I cannot express how badly I want IE6 to just f–king die. I’d really prefer it if IE7 went with it (it’s barely more than IE6+PNG support), and the sooner IE8 disappears the better, too.
So far as users stuck on IE6… screw ’em. They can get the hell off the Internet. We don’t allow people to drive unsafe cars on public roads, we don’t allow people to take untame animals for walks in public parks, we don’t let people to sell old paints with lead or insulation with asbestos, we don’t allow the sale of old medicines with dangerous additives. Just because someone wants to do something out of laziness or stupidity or even lack of means doesn’t force us to have to cope with it. The people still using IE6, for whatever reason, can get off the ‘Net and stay off it until they upgrade. That simple. The same goes for any other outdated software, including ancient insecure versions of Windows or Firefox or Linux and so on. Follow the safety rules or stay off the cyber roads.
You just need more web dev experience.
Somehow I quite agree with elanthis. For me IE 6 is now like Lynx. If you want to use it, use it; I’ll keep making the contents of my website accessible to all HTTP 1.1 compliant clients (this excludes Yahoo! Slurp); just don’t expect to get nice colors, shapes, and client behavior without decent CSS, JavaScript engines.
Now is when Microsoft makes the analog movement with its products; otherwise I’ll quite doubt that they really want people updating to IE8.
It’s actually easier to support lynx as a fallback than it is to support IE6 or NS4…
Lynx will make no attempt to parse your CSS, so assuming your page follows standards Lynx users will see the textual content just fine.
IE6/NS4 will attempt to render your CSS and such, but make such a pigs ear of it that content can become obscured and layout horribly broken.
my customers are no OK with me doing browser detection and notifying them that they have an older browser and to upgrade, and if they don’t things might not look good.
with today’s budgets shrinking, its easier to convince my customers that supporting IE6 isn’t viable.
I agree. Providing support for multiple versions of a browser going all the way back to 2001 is tedious when the Web sites you’re making are complex and rely on various languages. (Note: IE6 was released in the time that even the Mozilla 1.0 browser was still one year away.)
Google had already dropped support for Firefox 1.x about 1.5 years ago with Apps and they did the same thing for Gmail about a year ago. Firefox 2.x support is being phased out as well. So I also agree on it being “about time” for IE6.
I’m just glad Google and most Web designers choose not to bother the user with a nag-screen, but instead provide helpful instructions on how to upgrade their Web browser.
if IE6 was a car we be in deep trouble. IE is like a car that has unsafe faulty breaks and locks that a 3 year ago can break. Would people be happy with such a CAR (IE) which such design flaws?
Just use Firefox if you dont or cant use Windows update.
“or even lack of means doesn’t force us to have to cope with it”
That’s pretty cold.
I agree. Working in a small shop with limited IT support, I brought up this issue over a year ago. Now what we have is our systems are setup so that IE 6 is no longer out there. Our custom XP builds are built upon IE7 and some IE8. IE6 have been permanently removed from XP and when we migrate to Win7, that will be done and over with for IE6.
I am happy to see IE6 die. I am a web developer and IE6 and its userbase is the reason I could never use the full potential of todays JavaScript, CSS and HTML.
Unfortunately thanks to everybody who buys WIN7 we’ll be soon developing all for Silverlight within a couple of months; just because noone realizes that buying MS products is the same as turning back time (again…). I lost complete faith in humanity lately.
Talk about pointing the gun away from one foot, and shooting the other.
Nope, the blame lies with you. You failed to draw the line and say no, to stand up to the values you hold. I’ve been developing with the latest and greatest quite easily.
I don’t blame you though, it’s you who should blame yourself. You’ve got a job to keep, a boss to please and stupid deadlines to meet. But honestly, the reason IE6 persists is because developers have not been willing to put their foot down and just say no.
dammit where is the thumb-up button???
I agree but that means I must quit my job now and start a web company of my own with no customers. So, the only way to stop IE6 and other MS web-crap is to end one’s IT carreer or die. Feels a bit like Orwell’s 1984.
Well you obviously lucky enough to not work for a company that says that they support all major browsers. … some of us have to keep our jobs, which means supporting IE6 .. since it is still a major browser.
Edited 2010-01-30 11:29 UTC
I’ve walked out of a lot of companies, I’ve had managers storm out of the room because I wouldn’t bend to their will. I put myself through four years of hell before finding my ideal job.
_You_ are the expert. You’ve worked obsessively with technology your whole life to learn what you have, they are paying you for your knowledge; you know what is right and what is wrong and it is a detriment to yourself to fall into a corporate culture where they are not respecting your expertise. IE6 is bad for the company, will increase costs, increase risks and require untold expenses to move away from when it finally stops being supported by Microsoft. Developers have to force their company to accept that, otherwise both the developer and the company will come to fail, and the blame will be put on the developer for not saying no. That’s the harsh unfairness of the position.
What don’t you get Kroc??
Our customers pay us to have their website working in “Every Major Browser” … which means supporting the shitfest that is IE6 and IE7 … therefore my job is to make this stuff work in IE6/7 wherever possible.
That is what I get paid to do. If I don’t do what I am paid to do I get sacked … and I really want to lose my job in the middle of a recession.
Edited 2010-01-30 12:04 UTC
IE6 is dying so it is clear eventually will be pointless to support it. the question is not what but when.
the expertise of developers should be propagated until those who talk with the client to eventually convince him that supporting IE6 leads to a position where nobody really wants to be.
how to convince? by the numbers, as always. you have to gauge things extensively and find when the extra cost of supporting IE6 is greater than the income it enables. google made his numbers and found that that moment is now.
I think actually many other companies and freelances are in the same situation; just they didn’t realize yet.
I can give another reference
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1530934&cid=30962676
IE6 has been identified as bad business also by that company. They even went beyond and identified IE 7 and 8 as well. That’s the mechanism. Do numbers, show them to managers, drop IE.
In my company as long as IE6 has more than a 5% market share we will be supporting it. Some of our customers actually run IE6 and IE7… so they will expect their website to look right in the browser.
TBH I expect we will be having the same discussion about having to support IE7, IE8 in 5 years time.
Edited 2010-01-30 18:37 UTC
Oh give me a break. If even 5% of your sales come from IE6 users it doesn’t make sense to drop support. I hate IE6 too but I also understand that eCommerce companies pay for traffic and it doesn’t make sense to block a browser if there isn’t a net gain in development savings. A big company like Amazon would lose millions a year if they blocked IE6.
He doesn’t get that a lot of these companies have business models that require supporting IE6. Walking out on them will just ensure that someone else does the job. There’s plenty of people out of work, they’ll easily find someone willing to support IE6.
Well said! I’ve done the same but on a systems level. About four years ago I had a job as a systems engineer where my boss, a huge Sun fan, wanted me to implement NIS+ across our Solaris infrastructure. NIS+, the successor to NIS and Yellow Pages, is a totally closed system, with no support on anything other than Solaris, and is deprecated in favour of LDAP. When you start the configuration process the first thing you are presented with is a warning that it’s deprecated and a link to a Sun website with tools to help you migrate to LDAP. I pointed this out to my boss and his answer was to do it anyway as we still had one Solaris 8 and one Solaris 9 system running. Both Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 have full LDAP support and again I pointed this out to my boss, telling him that I refuse to waste my time implementing a deprecated and no longer developed protocol.
After many a tantrum on his part, I took my misgivings up a level. I won the battle but ended up leaving a few months later as my working environment became too hellish. I did end up getting a better job as my CV now included LDAP, an open and widely used protocol. The manager ended up getting fired a few months after that for related behaviour.
Very true.
Again, I couldn’t be more in agreement. I know that at a time like this, with the world economy in it’s current state of weakness, you may feel that anything you do to keep your job is a good thing but in many respects it’s at times like these that you can make the most change. Explain to your boss why it’s a bad idea to use a certain technology. Explain the costs in time and effort related to first implementing this technology, the hidden cost of security related to that technology and finally the added expense of having to migrate away from that technology in the all too near future. If your manager still does not agree with you, ask him/her to clarify. If you’re not convinced, take it a level higher. If you end up getting sacked you still end up with a very good reason for why at your next interview.
Explain to me why a company who does a million in sales a year online should ditch IE6 even if it makes up 10% of its sales.
IE6 is still the most common browser in Asia.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-as-monthly-200901-201001
A company with strong Asian sales would be committing suicide if they stopped supporting IE6. Web developers would have banned IE6 years ago if they had the power to. The situation is far more complex than you and kroc are making it.
That’s a very good point indeed but if the company gets 10% of it’s sales from IE6 browsers, what does it do about the 90% from other browsers? I doubt very much that a standards compliant browser would render a page designed for IE6 particularly well. It’s far more likely that they would develop say two sites and use the user agent ID to display the correct page for that browser. This would leave the company with a clear path to follow once IE6 has gone the way of the dodo.
I don’t know about Kroc but what I was talking about was in-house developed intranets and ActiveX apps. If the company you work for still wants you to continue developing in-house apps specifically targeting IE6, you need to explain to them that it’s a dead end. Websites can and should be updated to deal with web standards, I think that anybody would agree with that statement as more and more business is done via mobile devices, most of which are not windows based. It’s the badly coded in-house apps that are causing the big head ache. Big corporations that run in-house IE6 apps are finding the cost of migrating away from IE6 prohibitively expensive but the bottom line is that unless they stop coding for IE6 only, they will start, and often have started already, to pay in added security costs and code rot as the original developers move on to greener pastures.
I agree but again, see above. IE6 will die, there is no question there but I highly doubt a web-based company would only support IE6.
No it doesn’t which why you have to use all kinds of conditional statements or create a separate website. It’s quite annoying.
They will already know it is a dead end. If you are hired to work on an in-house IE6 app then it will be a legacy system. Throwing a tantrum in this case wouldn’t make a difference either.
Web developers can use tags like ie6upate.com in their personal websites to encourage change but can’t be blamed for businesses that are tied to IE6.
If you are hired to develop in-house legacy apps than yeah, it’s your own fault and you have nothing to wine about but if you where hired as a dev in general, and your company specifically asks you to continue to develop something that is so obviously a dead end, I don’t see the problem with pointing that out and refusing to do so.
I don’t agree. I think that developers that don’t try and communicate the inherent stupidity of continuing to develop for such an obviously dead platform are doing both themselves and the company they work for, as well as the rest of us in this case, a massive disservice. We techies not only get paid to do a job, we also get paid for our knowledge in our respective fields. If we don’t kick up a fuss and try to provide the employer with alternative solutions we are not doing what we are paid for.
It was lazy and short sighted developers that got us in this predicament in the first place. I would say the same about a systems administrator that was harbouring a bot net. It doesn’t matter if he’s unaware of it because he should be, that’s his job.
No it was short sighted managers that went with quick and dirty solutions.
Suggesting an alternative is one thing but kroc said that developers should walk away which is unrealistic.
I’m saying, as the developer, to stand up for your technical knowledge. The manager is not the programmer, and if you let him become the programmer, and you the monkey in front of the keyboard, then you’re in for a hellish, unfulfilled and stress-filled job. When that happens, I change jobs, for my own sanity.
By logical extension, the manager is the business brain, and it’s his/her role to determine that 20% (or whatever) of the target market actually matters, or how licensing and support should be handled within a company, and that if the programmer steps into the business role, he/her will be in for a hellish and unfulfilled environment, and should fire the programmer…?
These decisions are seldom 100% technical (or 100% anything else.) Communication, empathy, and understanding would go much further than tantrums or ultimatums here.
And programming is an art, not 100% technical; I’m well aware of the empathetic requirements.
Or, quite possibly, you have an inflated sense of your own self-worth and a bloated ego, and you’ve convinced yourself that idealism & poverty are more important than compromise & prosperity. I’ve met a lot of geeks who believed one thing or another, and most of them read the future wrong — and yet they believed passionately in what they believed. Look, I’m not saying that’s you, but there are trade-offs in every business. The first priority is to know your customers and serve their needs. If an employee isn’t helping you reach that goal, then perhaps that employee should leave or reevaluate his priorities.
Although a good point, to be fair that is pretty much what Kroc was saying:
Being idealistic isn’t always a bad thing. Sure, some people take it too far but then again, selling your soul for a buck is hardly what I’d call something to be proud of.
ie 6 isn’t a major browser, it’s an old version of a major browser. they seriously need to just have every website block browsers that aren’t the newest version of internet explorer.
Who needs to do that?
20% market share makes IE6 major browser, regardless how slow, buggy and obsolete it is.
Refusing to support it will just make your clients go elsewhere, and I don’t blame them, they should have their web usable for this fifth of web surfers.
Oh yes it is entirely his fault that he chose to be able to have a meal every day. And that child in Africa with AIDS and abusive parents, it’s all his fault that his life is like that, right?
Edited 2010-01-30 11:51 UTC
You dude are so full of … yourself. I was about to say more but I see that the person already answered much more politely.Just want to say this though, I’m sick of you people blaming developers for such stupid things when all they do is to respect the specs.If your manager says this is how it should be done and you come and say,listen boss this won’t be cross compatible but it will take like twice faster to implement what do you think the answer is? The manager,for all he knows, doesn’t even know if he will be there when the shit is gonna hit the fan! All he’s doing is to deliver on promises (which most probably he set).
Well, maybe the solution then is to fire all IT managers and sue them for screwing up an entire industry
The blame lies with developers eh? Ever heard for a word “client”?
Look it up, it should be in every dictionary.
I’d bump this up but I have already commented. But also, being more “old school” (emphasis on the OLD) I think that pure HTML/CSS, or at least less reliance on Javascript, is an even better way to go.
Why do we NEED all this “flash”y stuff anyway? :/
I was thinking much along those lines myself.
The phase-out should have occurred by web-sites and services becoming non functional.
This is the way it always went in the past. The 4.0 browser evolution was rather smooth for that very reason.
IE/NS 3.0 would not longer work, you needed NS4, or IE4/5… or Opera…
–The loon
<–[if lte IE 7]>
But as a web developer, my aim is to make money. The reason I get the jobs that the last guy didn’t is because he put his “stupid” foot down. Why blame my boss for someone else’s crappy software?
The irony is that IE6 was released in 2001. Now in 2010 I STILL have to design sites for modern browsers and then IE7, which was released in 2006.
<[endif]–>
Most of the web designers I know would just love to dump support for all versions of IE. They’re all just starting to mess around with all the fancy new css in chrome and firefox. IE8 just fixes bugs in IE6 and IE7. There isn’t support for anything vaguely new, just new CSS bugs to workaround.
Same goes for the javascript toolkits. Most would surely be thrilled to drop IE 6 support. When the developer migration starts it’ll be very quick courtesy of all the popular libraries dumping support in quick succession.
I pity people who are stuck supporting IE6 once the development platforms move on (this will include me unfortunately)
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Edited 2010-02-01 12:32 UTC
As I remember, that’s what “Google Chrome Frame” is all about, isn’t it? Just install it, and one can still use Google services in IE6.
That’s a good solution for home users but for corporations it’s still a no go. It takes a long time for a large company’s IT staff to test and approve even a browser plugin and the vast majority of people who will be stuck with IE6 are going to be corporate users. After all, home users don’t need to do much to upgrade on switch.
Bingo. My company (Fortune 500, very large) is stuck on IE6 because we have so many custom ActiveX controls and web apps that were designed for our intranet. Thousands of seats, dozens of departments, its a logistical nightmare to make sure that an upgrade won’t break something important.
Just out of interest – what’s the usual process of “approving” software in a corporate environment? Inspect the sources (if available)? Or even dissect the binaries? And what does “approve” actually mean after all? Does it mean: “It’s not malware”, “There are no security holes in it”, “It won’t break anything else on our systems”, …?
Sadly it can be exceedingly complex.
What happened was that the corporate world hired Microsoft for help with their infrastructure creation, and so found themselves heavily using Microsoft products. BUT, because those products were so buggy, the software had to get incorrect data in order to run ( for instance, a frame designed for IE will not display the same in any other browser – if at all – the measurements are wrong in IE6 ).
What is worse is that most companies wanted to help off-load the computing requirements across to the many desktops and workstations and so used ActiveX very liberally, furthermore encrusting themselves.
And of course, as Java became popular it was easy to just trust the Microsoft-supplied Java rather than go through the hassle of relying on MORE software.. so they just used the bundled MSJava, which is often incompatible with real Java for most things, but close enough to make finding the problems difficult. Then they inbred ActiveX and MSJava in such a way that the primary computations would be performed client-side, and the results sent back to a central server for little more than rerouting or storage.
Naturally there were many bugs from all angles in every step and the expenses spiraled out of control until the corporation had no choice but to put a halt at a workable level of development.
The end result, in most cases, was a barely functioning infrastructure with hard-to-understand user interfaces, improper naming of actions, and bugs galore. But the basic needed functionality was in place, and so only bug fixing was permitted as maintenance.
Now, years later, the bugs are mostly repaired or worked around in a workable manner, and some may have even written new UIs to make the software make sense to the average employee. But, the code is still ActiveX and MSJava underneath, and it would be rather difficult to find a solution that would permit blending the old with the new without introducing migrations errors.
Corporations have something that works, and that is all that matters to them – especially considering the price tag.
Personally, I would just rewrite the whole code from the ground up. In many cases that is an easy solution. But then one most realize that technology continually advances, and this problem will happen again in another ten years.. next time it will be because a company decided to write to support, say, Sun Java or decided to go with Linux Kernel 2.6.x, and they can’t use 3.0 but are now having hardware compatibility issues and can’t acquire old enough hardware to keep things going.
I support a few small businesses locally which are using Windows 98 to run DOS-based program upon which they have their lives invested. Windows XP cannot run the program, so they are stuck with Windows 98 or lower. Next step may be emulating Windows 98 on very fast computers, which will still slow things down.
On company uses a package which costs almost $20k/year to license, except the company is out of business.. so you can’t re-license the app. So I had to hack it to work to prevent this business from losing.. well… more than you are likely to make in a lifetime…
I currently am trying to find a way to export all of the data from the program, but that has proven to be more than just a little difficult. This company didn’t write anything in any standard manner. At least they were forced to index the data…
It could take a couple of years for me to get the data extracted into a usable format and then more time to write a replacement program. Worse part is that the workload is such that it would take ten qualified helpers to cut the duration enough to be economically feasible. And we are dealing with personal information there, so we cannot just hire people at random.
Now scale my little problem up to 100 products which all speak to one another…
–The loon
PS: sorry if I’m rambling, I’m bored…
It means – “Since we pay enough $$ to MS, it has to be OK, right ?” There’s no way of inspecting the source of something that it’s closed source and proprietary, just as well as disassembling the binary itself – in most cases that would be illegal. The corporation says : I want homogenization and interoperability of all my products – is there a vendor offering all that with support – yes, MS. And this is how they are stuck with it. For a long time. After the initial process of installing and configuring, then fixing numerous bugs, so that your intranet plays well, and communication with partner networks too, you’re inhaling poisonous air – you’ve just engaged your corp. in a slavery. Imagine a 20,000 employees or more all over the world working all the time (this is not my company, fortunately) and a process to upgrade the entire infrastructure without breaking any single process. It’s a nightmare, this includes having multiple system engineers all across the world sites. My personal choice in such theoretical situation would be Linux based env for many reasons, I believe you know most of them, and last but not least – the ability to look and control the source code, thus reacting in a timely manner shall a hazard is facing us. Can you imagine the attack against Google being transformed to attack against largest banks or sites like Paypal, amazon, etc ?
I use some of the MS products, and I’m not the typical hater, but I hate the locks and the latches. You know what I mean. In this relation, I’d rather call for freedom. It is such a pity that corporations like Red Hat and Novell don’t want to challenge MS in this market. Or maybe they are trying, but corporate CTOs don’t want migration hell on their heads, I don’t know. Again, if I was to make a choice for a large corp. I’d pay enough to RH or whatever company to equip my corp. with Linux base, plus offering support. This is going a bit astray from the main discussion, one more vote for phasing out IE6 and sticking to web standards. There’s no need of more hassle when implementing simple form or some CSS trick.
This is totally personal opinion, and it has nothing related to my former and current employer.
Edited 2010-01-31 13:30 UTC
Well, in my experience, it very much depends on the size of the company but generally it means all of those things except dissecting the binaries or looking at the source code. If it’s small, say under 100 people, it usually comes down to the IT team itself as they are usually very much aware of what each department uses in the way of software and are able to test accordingly. This usually amounts to installing the application or plugin and testing it with any application that could be affected, i.e. company intranet and so on.
The problems start to arise once you hit the 300-500 marker and upwards. These companies don’t always use off the shelf software. Now let me just say that I don’t think that using custom developed software is a bad thing, as long as you have in house developers who at least have access to the code if they didn’t develop the apps in the first place. Where it gets tricky is when lets say the company who developed the software goes out of business for some reason and your app, which the HR department relies on for time keeping, its self is reliant on IE6 specific code. So you are stuck with this app that was developed for a platform that is going to be end of life within the next few years and have no easy way of updating the app to run with another version of the Trident rendering engine. In the mean time, the rest of the companies apps, which were all developed in house, have been ported to Java and are run on Websphere, yet you are still stuck on IE6 for the HR department, even though it’s a potential attack vector and is starting to cause sleepless nights for the security guys.
Someone comes along and recommends Google Chrome Frame so you decide to test it out. Now, the testing will take time as it needs to be tested in full so after an initial test is done in the IT department, a limited rollout is done to test it in real world situations. As this has a potential cost in time and resources, not to mention the inconvenience to users should something go wrong, it generally needs to be approved by someone higher up the chain who in turn may feel the need to refer it further up still. So as you can see, something like this could potentially take a very long time to even get to the approval of testing faze.
To finally get an app approved, it must be shown to cause no disruption to any other application that would be used in that particular situation and it must be proven to be costs effective. More often than not, it’s far cheaper to either buy something off the shelf or re-code from scratch using in house developers and open standards.
Addendum: There is also the question of support. In the end, who is going to support the new software will always outweigh the actual costs of buying it so if your proposed app is free but has no paid for support, you can pretty much forget it when it comes to large corporations.
Edited 2010-01-31 18:38 UTC
So far, all discussion has focused on IE 6.
What about the full suite of browers for which Google Apps will continue to support?
“Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.”
Hum….where is Opera in this list? Was it ever supported at all?
if it works in ff, chrome and safari it will most likely also work in opera. thank god there are some developers who read the spec from w3c.
This one is a bit of a rant.
My “web-mail provider” no longer supports Opera 9.50 on its main (adds and links) page…..This is only a 0.50 version older than the current. On they other hand, there is still full support for IE 6.0 which is a full 2.00 version older than the current.
To add salt on the user wound, there is still some support for IE 5.0 (under Win98SE) which is a full 3.00 version older than the current.
I never paid much attention to the adds and links provided when I logged-out of the mail page. However, it’s a bit infuriating to note the degree of inconsistency in support of the various browsers.
I was just talking to my boss about us phasing out support for IE6 on our carts this year.
Just a nightmare for my web folks.
I don’t care at all about IE 6, but this change is going to screw people who want to use alternative operating systems which use “non-standard” browsers.
Google Docs was the only way to have a modern office suite (supporting annoying proprietary MS files) on BeOS/Haiku (with Bon Echo 2) or Amiga (with OWB).
It’s Google’s choice to do what they want with their site, of course, but this is just another example of how the internet is getting more and more limited – “supported browsers” and “supported plugins” which require “supported operating systems”. So much for free and open internet.
Except that Safari, Firefox, and Chrome are all standards-compliant browsers. Are you telling me that BeOS/Haiku doesn’t have a standards-compliant browser? If that’s the case, sounds like they’d better get their act together.
A supported browser doesn’t mean you must use that browser, it just means they are the browsers Google are testing with their apps. They cannot test every browser on every os, so it makes sense to focus testing on the major browsers at the time. Notice that I do not see any operating systems in that list, only browsers. In other words, Google seem to be doing their best to be os-agnostic and they’re mostly testing with standards-compliant browsers (IE7/IE8 being the unfortunately necessary exception).
Doesn’t look like any kind of attempt to kick down the alternative oses to me.
I would like to point out that there is nothing stopping alternative OS from using the same engines in the supported list. Webkit is opensource and has been ported nearly everywhere. Gecko is open source as well and is supported on many platforms. The only exception is IE, which once again shows what the real issue is. Relying on a single point of failure(in this case MS refusal to implement standards correctly) is what has caused the mess we are in.
You’ve never worked with IE6. Getting it to comply with a complex AJAX app is a major PITA. Yes their choice to not support IE6 will mean that fewer people can use it. f–k them. Software applications are not a right. They take hard work and do not appear magically from internet fairies.
Sorry, but I do not follow your reasoning here. How would obsoleting a proprietary, crappy browser affect alternative operating systems?
Dutch Social Security sticks to IE6, because all the B***S*** that was written for them, for a lot of money of course, won’t work with IE7 or IE8 or even worse, Firefox. Worse, because the CIO is bribed by Microsoft, as so many of his colleagues, so there is no room for FF. 10000 users (only 10000 users) will be stuck with IE6, whatever good reason not to. Beware of the Dutch: they say right and they mean left.
Oh my God! They killed the internets!
You bastards!
I wonder why a company like MS that can produce something as good and usable as W7 can’t stick to the standards ? Point your IE to the acid test and let me know if it passes more than 50%. We’re not talking about the 100% at all, don’t even think about it. On a question : why you didn’t make it compliant once again (The IE8) some guy from MS said : well, we know it’s not really compliant, but we ask our users to be patient, we’re working on it. This is a general bullshit answer since IE5 was out. There’s not much to say about that browser, besides developers are struggling to make the websites work with it and I have seen cases where Opera on Linux and MS, FF on Linux and MS, Safari on Mac and Chrome on MS were doing the same thing on a certain web page, whereas IE from 6 to 8 was wrong. I promise myself that I won’t, ever, talk about it here or anywhere else, nor I will open it.