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Comment by ct | Hacker News Reader

Instead of asking users to abandon XP/IE6 - why not just issue a simple patch for the flaw? Of course that would mean less sales of Win7, etc. which I guess is the real reason they're asking users to abandon it parlaying the security situation into their advantage.

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Unfortunately that's what they've been doing for years and years now.. IE 6 is definitely reaching its end of life and companies that depend on it are unfortunate. Probably at the time, they never thought of designing a system that would be independent of the platform. All new PCs come with IE 7 or 8. Applications that only run on IE 6 would mean they would only run on Win XP - companies would have to upgrade as any new computer that they purchase will most likely be incompatible with their application based on IE 6.

They are not unfortunate. They are just poorly managed.

It never looked like Microsoft would support IE6 forever. You should always plan to upgrade your software or you will end up maintaining vintage hardware because it's the only thing that runs your vintage software.

Not that it's not fun to maintain old computers - I keep a collection of machines from the late 70's through mid-to-late 90's - but it's no fun if your business depends on them working reliably.

Computers get pretty temperamental in their teens.

When you're a business who's non-technical, you probably wouldn't know a thing about upgrade. All you cared would be minimal cost for maximum ROI. I would agree they are poorly managed - some people assume IT is easy. Clearly, it's not.

I'm perhaps being naive here, but I'm not sure "a simple patch" exists. It could be one of those bugs that requires something non-simple. But I of course have no idea, not having access to the code (nor really even understand the flaw).

of course they want people to buy windows 7 or vista, but it's not like this is the ONLY bug. IE6 has been buggy for it's entire life, who's to say this is the very last time it will need patching?

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