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Comment by tjstankus | Hacker News Reader

I'd venture to guess that not upgrading from IE6 is more costly in terms of overall, sustained economic impact. Sure, it costs the government money to upgrade right now. But multiply the costs of continuing to support IE6 across all their vendors over time and I'd bet that number pales in comparison.

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The British government is in the middle of the most savage round of emergency spending cuts since world war two.

They're trying to cut departmental budgets by 25%-40%.

They're trying to reduce the civil service head-count by 30% or thereabouts.

There is no money for replacing anything that isn't a life-or-death emergency. They just axed all new school building and structural maintenance across the entire country. Leaking roofs aren't going to be fixed.

With all due respect, upgrading ten year old computer systems (that still work, after a fashion) is the bottom of their priority tree.

Good points, all. I'm not advocating that they should upgrade. I understand they're in budget slashing mode. Just pointing out that the longview approach would likely be cheaper and that their "more cost effective" statement should probably include a caveat that it's based on short-term cost analysis.

Unfortunately government accounting rules don't take the long view into account.

If nothing else, there's a general election due in (5 years minus 4 months) and counting. After which, the budget is someone else's problem.

Sauce have a point though, if there are new sites being made then cost of supporting IE6 is going up and up for the new sites, for sure. Is there anything stopping the use of IE6-tab or a gov modified version of it?

They just axed all new school building and structural maintenance across the entire country.

Not quite. They axed the Building Schools for the Future programme which is only part of the school building budget.

I work for a startup that supplies enterprise systems to some very large companies that are still on IE6. In my view, when these companies refuse to upgrade it's a way of pushing (very real and substantial) costs onto us. We're now at the point where our starting position in sales negotiation is that we require IE7, if potential customers don't like it it's a negotiating point. If we really had to we'd support IE6, but we'll look to recover those costs in license/support fees.

Ultimately, this is good for the industry. Until companies like us start attaching a visible cost to IE6 support, these departments will not upgrade.

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