UK government: Upgrading away from IE6 costs too much | Hacker News Reader

UK government: Upgrading away from IE6 costs too much

arstechnica.com

22 pointsimagii20 comments

I think it would be most sensible to at least create a strategy for moving away from IE6.

The UK government's current stance doesn't address the problem .. it postpones doing anything until support runs out in 2014.

What will happen then?

They'll force MS to give them another 5 years.

or MS could give them a pricepoint just slightly lower than what it cost to do a proper upgrade?

The cost in upgrading is changing all their existing systems, so the "pricepoint" would have to be negative X million dollars.

This is like saying that saving taxpayers money today is saving the taxpayers money in general. This is totally untrue - 5 years of malware, support tickets, etc. that need not be there costs way more than doing the transition now versus having to do it later anyway.

Aren't anti-malware software and similar expenses needed regardless of browser version? This is a cost that can't be avoided so the upgrade isn't going to eliminate that and save money in the long run.

It is my experience that the risks are exponentially higher the further you get from the "flagship" product. This is also true for Firefox - if you don't update as updates become available you will soon find yourself with something bad on your machine if you're not careful (and on Windows). Plus, while Windows 7 built-in protection isn't great (which, if they went past IE6 they should upgrade the OS too), it does prevent some massive system-wide changes and rootkits.

At the moment, the UK Government can barely afford a sandwich and a cup of tea, let alone a major IT upgrade.

When support eventually runs out then the benefits of switching will clearly outweigh the costs, but at a time when we're talking about reducing the number of MPs and selling off whole government departments, I can't blame them. Maybe the last government could have averted this, maybe not, but at the moment we're such deep economic shit that it's just not a priority.

(disclosure: I voted Tory, I hate IE, I enjoy both sandwiches and tea)

Despite the last paragraph in the article, another reason for refusing to upgrade is the costs involved in service pack upgrades. IE 7 is only available for Windows XP SP2 and higher. Upgrading to SP2 was traumatic for many organizations, so quite a few did not roll it out.

No upgrade from SP2? Well, IE 6 and only IE 6 it is then.

A related issue: IE 8 offers the ability to run in IE 7 compatibility mode, with the inclusion of a header in the source web page. Despite dire warnings to the contrary, some website developers for UK government insist on setting the header and declaring that IE 8 compatibility has been achieved. I can't wait to see how that will end, to be honest.

How about going to a different browser than IE? E.g. Links does not rely on any service packs as far as I know.

I totally agree. I actually worked on a closed government system back in the day. The plain fact is that they moved to Web apps a long time ago. Most of the web apps are geared towards IE6 and the messed up style guide. This means that even if they try to upgrade some of their military operations will not be working correctly and there for need a style upgrade... I know of just three projects like this. Building for IE6 when IE8 was out was horrendous. So I imagine there are a ton more projects just like it.

Stupid. IE6 won't be around forever and upgrading to IE9/IE10/IEx will not be cheaper then.

No IE6 won't be around forever, but if, in 2014, they can directly upgrade to IE10, say, then they will have avoided going IE6->IE8->IE10 and thus have saved the cost of an upgrade.

Makes sense to me.

The problem is with this argument is that you can keep applying it forever. Also, a number of relatively smaller steps are easier to manage than one single big step.

A sensible step would be to get into the habit of upgrading browsers/tools. A workplace that finds it traumatic to upgrade to IE 7, 8 or 9 or from Windows XP or Windows 7 or even from Office 2003 to Office 2007 is not going to be prepared for changes in the future.

Small steps. Regularly taken.

I think you're missing that some of those small steps weren't obvious at the time everyone was writing software that the government leans heavily on that only works on IE6, the people that developed it are probably long gone by now and rewriting everything is hardly justifiable.

Large banks are having a hard enough time ditching it and they have a clear motivation to do so to aid competitive edges.

Actually you can't (not in this case at least). Microsoft promised to support ie6 until april 2014, so they can't apply the argument after that. And ie6 -> ie8 (-> ie10) step is probably about as big as ie6 -> ie10.

That said, I still don't agree with using ie6.

They should at least install Chrome Plugin.

The problem isn't on the client, it's on the server. Using the Chrome plugin would break their apps just as well as using Chrome itself.

To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer.

Chrome Frame is only activated on pages that specifically request it with a meta tag or HTTP header. If they deploy Chrome Frame government-wide, they could start developing modern web apps without losing compatibility with their legacy IE apps, allowing a gradual transition.

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