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Comment by BigCanOfTuna | Hacker News Reader

Great idea. Punish the poor people who are forced into using IE6. A significant portion of the users would assume that there is something wrong with their vision rather than the browser.

I suggest an alert saying "Your browser is old. Please upgrade or contact your IT department."

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I also think that intentionally breaking the website (in the worst possible way) in an unsupported browser is exactly the behavior we're trying to get rid of, along with IE6.

Yeah. But unfortunately IE6 doesn't support any functionality that could break the user, so developers are forced to break the browser instead.

You are forced to use IE6 because the IT department decided that's all you need for your job. If sites stopped working in IE6 then people could make the case that they need a modern browser for their work. In the US and Europe, IE6 usage is around 5%. I think we're close enough to push IE6 completely out.

No, one is forced to use IE6 by the IT department because many internal web applications developed during IE6's time targeted the browser instead of web standards.

The idea of having sites "stop working" isn't particularly helpful, because the things that would actually matter if they stopped working are the internal stuff chained to IE6.

I've heard this argument a lot, but it doesn't hold up.

These mythical IT departments could quite easily allow for a modern browser to be installed alongside IE6, so that users could continue to access legacy applications while enjoying a modern experience on the rest of the web.

Sorry, but there truly is no (good) excuse for any IT dept to restrict users to IE6.

It's a support "issue." Large IT departments will say that it requires extra support to install a second browser. Is it worth the "extra" cost in time and support?

As a developer, in some organizations, you can't install anything on your own machine. So, you can't get your software to work on Firefox, for example. All your software simply has to work on the company standard browser. The idea is that you'll deal with it later...and 8 years later...

This is a huge software development issue. A disastrous money waster.

The solution I see is to start to charge more for an IE6 compatible version of any Web software (and charge for the IE6 compatible version in the cases when the software is normaly free).

IE6-compatibility adds to the work of creating new web apps, so the client's bill ends up naturally being higher if they want IE6 support. With IE6 still having almost 20% of the market, it sometimes makes business sense to continue to support IE6.

P.S. I wish IE6 would die in a fire.

I don't actually see this as a problem, organizations with rigid and inflexible IT "policy" will be less nimble and competitive. The best way to make the problem go away is to eat the dinosaurs lunch.

Sorry, but there truly is no (good) excuse for any IT dept to restrict users to IE6.

You can't install IE7 or 8 alongside 6 and no other "modern browser" has any kind of reasonable group policy management support or administrative control over updating or extension policies.

virtualization

Buzzword bingo, I call house!

Virtualize what, how, and how does that help?

I can see terminal services running published IE6 for legacy apps with desktops having IE8 on them and doing that as a workaround to have side by side, but where would virtualisation help?

There's application virtualization like Sandboxie (http://www.sandboxie.com/) or even Microsoft App-V (http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/appv/default.mspx).

My reasoning goes as follows :

Assuming "You can't install IE7 or 8 alongside 6"

You can virtualise Windows XP on Windows 7 and run both browsers. This alleviates pain and provides for legacy apps that rely on 6.

Of course, infinitely better to just ditch IE completely and the dependent apps, and simply write that off [amortizing against future pain]

Not sure if you have spent much time inside an enterprise. It doesn't matter if there is no excuse, they won't do it, and calling them mythical isn't going to help convince them.

The reason I say mythical is that I have never heard these arguments from someone who actually works for one of these enterprises.

(This is not surprising to me, because I know that if I worked for a company that only allowed IE6, the last thing I would want would be for developers to perpetuate my misery by continuing to support it.)

If someone can actually tell me the name of a major corporation that only allows IE6 to be installed on its workstations, I'd be genuinely interested in hearing it.

UBS (one of the world's largest banks).

I worked there for 4 years. As a developer, I was able to install other browsers (that was against the company IT policy, but I didn't care). When I was working on the business side, though, I didn't have admin access to my machine, and so I had to use IE6, like everyone else.

All the internal apps were built to work on IE6, too. And there are a lot of internal apps. Half of them wouldn't display properly on Firefox when I tried opening them there (this was a few years ago, I didn't try Chrome or Safari).

My day job suffers that exact same problem.

We're now promptly causing the same thing to happen in a few years time by developing internal applications targeted at IE 8 and SilverLight instead of web standards :^)

No, one is forced to use IE6 by the IT department because many internal web applications developed during IE6's time targeted the browser instead of web standards.

I'd buy that if there were plenty of enterprises running Internet Explorer 4 or Windows 3.1 for exactly the same reason.

IE6 is probably backward compatible with IE4, and most 16-bit Windows 3.1 apps will run on 32-bit Windows XP or Windows 7 (you can find screenshots of Windows 1.0 programs running on Vista). I suspect IE6 introduced a lot of non-standard features like non-standard Javascript functions, more VBscript, more ActiveX, etc.

It's a joke....

It's a "joke" that is the thousandth obnoxious repetition of "Deliberately make the experience suck or impossible for IE 6 users."

Wouldn't the point really be about applying pressure to those able to fix the problem? The sad reality is that business reasons have prompted developers to support IE6 and thus kept the problems out of the user's field of view. Much like my experience with giving demos in the workplace, out in the world broken has to appear "broken" for anyone to care about fixing it. Purposefully making IE6 appear broken is the means to this end.

Glad we all feel sorry for IE6 users though.

And the counter is: If IE6 doesn't already appear broken to people out in the world already, in what sense that they care about is it broken?

I fail to see how that is a counter point. It doesn't appear to be broken because the effort of the developers required to support it. The rough edges that remain are too nuanced for the average person to notice. More and more IE6 is being left behind, but the holdouts, mostly in the corporate sphere, are going to need massive user pressure to get the internal IT machine moving.

It's a counter point because the kind of big bureaucratic custom website laden company which is stuck on IE6 doesn't give a damn that it takes you two months instead of one.

It's about as compelling as saying COBOL isn't much fun, how about you rewrite all your apps in Ruby-on-Rails because then my life will be more pleasant.

The real way to make ie6 go away is to charge so much to make any site work on it that there's a real economic imperative for companies to pause for thought and consider replanning.

When it doesn't cost a lot and your main argument is "why not rework your IT system because one bit of my job is a bit fiddly and boring" that's not such a compelling reason. See also CORBA, SOAP, COM, and endless other technologies which aren't fun but companies pay for and people work on anyway.

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