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Comment by DjDarkman | Hacker News Reader

It's useless unless they stop supporting older IE versions...

They do, when the versions of Windows that shipped with those versions of IE lapse out of their support period. That doesn't stop people from running them. They're our computers, nobody, including Microsoft, gets to decide what we run on them. They can only strongly encourage us to upgrade.

You can't stop supporting older versions until you have newer versions.

That's not what it's dependent on. IE6 will be supported until 2014. Even with Explorer's glacial release cycle that will be about 5 newer releases than IE6, 4 for the still supported IE7 and so on.

Agreed. Microsoft has talked about the need to end using IE 6.

It is now time to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk.

Can we please stop bashing MS for the continued usage of IE6? For it's time IE6 was a fine browser (honest), and what exactly is so bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete?

If you're tired of supporting IE6 on your site, then stop. Foisting off the cost of transitioning everyone off IE6 onto a big company like MS is comforting but ultimately unrealistic and selfish.

What's bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete is that it encourages people who know very little to think it is perfectly legitimate to continue using it long after it is obsolete.

It's their lousy software, it IS their responsibility to transition people off of it.

It's just not smart to replace a system that only works well in IE 6 because it might mess up your employees' ability to waste their time on some guy's random startup.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons why a corporation would continue to use IE6, despite its countless flaws.

In my experience, those systems are in dire need of replacement, anyway.

Security is the killer flaw, though. They're going to have to change once MS stops patching it - and who knows what 0 day (or -300 day) flaws lurk in IE6.

I hope you never have to understand the perverse inner workings of the corporate IT manager's mind. :'(

So the 'perfectly legitimate reasons' are all because of 'perverse inner workings' of some manager's mind?

I think it is perfectly okay for people to use obsolete software that does the job. You can always drop support for browser versions you don't want to support, but I think it's bad business and also a bit rude to try to dictate what software potential customers will use.

IE6 is still perfectly serviceable for the vast majority of the tasks web browsers are put to.

MS likes to pretend to want to end IE6, but it is all talk (ie the "funeral" they held for IE). What is so bad about getting them to also walk the walk?

It's not just IE6, it's IE7 and IE8.

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