Hacker News Reader

Comment by cesarb | Hacker News Reader

Large companies tend to be bad at keeping up-to-date. I know of a bank that still uses OpenOffice. No, not Apache OpenOffice: they still use the real OpenOffice.org.

Workstations are often locked down, so employees can't install or upgrade anything.

View on HN

A friend of mine working for the government told me that in one major government agency, the most popular version of IE used on their website is IE11.

The second most popular version? IE 6. Not even 8. IE 6.

Who still uses it? Employees of other government departments...

While this is plausible for the past, I think this info is outdated now. https://analytics.usa.gov has lots of data on this (and you can break it out by agency using the dropdown at the top). It also estimates that only 5% of data comes from federal networks.

(Disclaimer: I work on analytics.usa.gov.)

I didn't say US Government. Australia :)

It's open source. ;) https://github.com/18f/analytics.usa.gov#analyticsusagov

https://www.dto.gov.au/blog/building-better-services-with-an...

We should have analytics.dto.gov.au.

This is because some project once created an internal application with a web interface, which was tested with IE6. This application may be critical to keeping people happy (e.g. the HR system) or some unqualified bozo may want to 'cut costs' like updating apps to new browsers, so mandates sticking to a 'stable' version like IE6. And all future apps will have to target IE6 forever more...

It gets worse... People write apps that use Flash (online training) or Java applets.

There are solutions to this, but none of them involve using the one true SOE, one SOE to rule them all!

I would hope that they are using IE11 set to IE6 compatibility mode. My employer has an application that requires IE5 compatibility mode.

Yeah… just a reminder: IE6 was released in August 2011.

A little earlier than that: August 2001.

Can I blame bitrot? Yes, thanks, of course I meant 2001.

For a sense of just how long ago that was, IE6 was released before 9/11. Truly a more innocent time.

No it wasn't... It was released in 2001

2001, not 2011. Time flies. :)

Even if the employee can update it themselves, it is often prohibited, and fixing a vulnerability is treated as unauthorized installation of software, which is clearly against the terms of employment when using company computers. Whether they treat it as a big deal or not depends on who is involved, of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com