I listened to Paul Boag's AudioBoo this morning regarding IE6Update and had to comment. Here’s what I said:
I completely agree Paul, this is really bad.
I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of people still using IE6 do not have any choice in the matter, i.e. they're sitting in enterprises consisting of hundreds if not thousands of users where the process of upgrades are very strictly managed.
The biggest reason used by management for not upgrading is cost. If it doesn't effect the day today running of the business it is right at the bottom of the list of priorities. Sad but true.
Believe me when I say that most IT departments fight tooth and nail to get basic upgrades like these done but it's an uphill battle to justify the cost, especially during financial crisis times.
Of course, there are also IT departments that are ignorant to the issues if browser versions.
In addition to this comment I do have an example of IT department ignorance. A well known insurance company I used to work for has a very good and forward thinking web site that does not function well if viewed using IE6. However, 60,000 installed users within the company are still using IE6 because upgrading the web browser is the lowest priority. The people who need it, i.e. the web developers have special installations.
Unfortunately this is the sort of reality that internal IT departments are faced with and right now, IT departments are being thinned down and projects are mostly on hold unless they’re business critical.
I also dislike IE6 but as I said, most of the people who still have it, have absolutely no choice in the matter and using something like IE6Update does not help the matter, in fact it’s more likely to get you site blocked by IT if you do use it. So please don’t encourage it.
Sadly "security issues" is an all too common excuse for not supporting non-"standard" applications in an enterprise environment. Of course, what they should say is that it costs money to support these apps.
Of course they could also say, you can install it but we won't support you if you do as it is outside of the service level agreement. Unfortunately this can lead to issues where the user is non-productive on a system with non-standard apps installed. Just a whole horrible can of worms that users just do not understand nor want to understand.
So IT gets all the SH one Tee and not one iota of thanks.
Can you guess I've been in IT a long time? :-)
Posted by: Paul Shadwell | May 31, 2009 at 09:07 PM
I work in a large 60000+ company (not the one you mention here) who are still stuck with IE6 although as one of the Vista training team, I do have IE7. I even asked for Firefox but was told no, it has security issues
Posted by: Mike Thomas | May 31, 2009 at 08:09 PM