Hacker News Reader

Comment by shimonamit | Hacker News Reader

Corporate-land is still IE in the high percentages, including IE6. Hoping, wishing Chrome's new "ready for business" features will dent that...

View on HN

I can confirm that many corporations still use IE6 for some reason. It's quite ironic how much the value security, but on the other hand let their employees use a 10 year old browser.

1) Incompetent/lazy/understaffed/broke IT departments that cannot or will not adopt a new browser policy

2) Draconian IT policies preventing workers from using non-approved software

3) Idiotic decision making from last decade to use ActiveX/some other IE6 only feature for some critical applications.

That's because most companies are not technology companies. They purchase all of their IT infrastructure instead of building anything in-house. So if the vendors they buy from only support IE6, their customers will be stuck with IE6 until the vendor decides to upgrade or their customers go with someone else.

It's worse. Most of the time the companies buy these locked in software, then the vendor goes AWOL and nobody can fix the mess, so they just try to stick to it until it horribly fails.

IE6 still has extended support with XP, but in a few years things will be very bleak for some of these companies.

But it's not all bad, some enterprises have a modicum of reason, solve the problem and at least try to avoid getting in the same mess again. At least that's the trend I perceive.

Thankfully is possible to install Google chrome without administrative rights and it takes all the settings from the IE for the proxies and that stuff.

Bless google for that...

Yeah but you have to be able to run non-approved exe's to do that and so many places still don't allow that.

Enterprise world...

In my job even the developer computers are really closed down, its really anoying

(Thanks vim for the not-administrative rights exe also :D)

Locking down my development machine would cause my resignation. I'm always amazed that people will put up with stuff like that.

you're important enough in you company to "resign"? most of us peons here have to make do with "quittng"

Thats right, I told my boss this is shit, and he answered me that its the way it is and cannot be changed per security reasons. He is anoyed too.

What he told me is that the system is designed for the normal users, so is as restricted as possible so that they cannot break it.

Since more and more developers have been joining the company this is becoming a really anoying issue, but nobody of the people who have enough power and could force a change cares about this stuff.

Personally, with my own custom system I would be very much productive, altough vim already boosted my productivity even being on windows (xp) ...

I think it's really important to remember this context too.

The results actually show that visitors to sites run by site counters customers show that distribution not that the internet as a whole see's that distribution too don't they?

On a site that I run for developers I see less than 1% IE, on a site that a customer runs that deals with many big corporates it's mostly IE and IE 6 at that. Unfortunately I don't think we'll be seeing the death of older browsers any time soon but in some contexts it's OK not to support them.

I would have thought the popularity of IE6 is not because of an advanced business features that Chrome can compete on, but is instead due to legacy OS, and legacy web applications that only work on IE6.

Some businesses are also using IE6 as a kind of a filtering system. For example, if Facebook Chat doesn't work on IE6, they only consider that positive.

Even if you're right and some companies do count this as a plus, I wouldn't touch that company with a ten foot pole. Why would anyone subject themselves to such extremist oligarchy in which you are forbidden from doing mostly anything that doesn't fit within some random business rules?

An "IE6 compatibility mode" for Chrome anyone? That would be the last hurdle for corporate adoption. Now that's what I call "low barrier of entry"!

Interesting... an opt-out-per-site rather than opt-in-per-site version of Chrome Frame.

An "IE6 compatibility mode" for Chrome anyone?

Easy, all you have to do is reproduce the entireity of IE6 in Chrome. Every little undocumended feature, quirk and difference. And it's all a black box cause IE6 is closed source. Good luck with that. :P

Couldn't they just use something like the IE tab extension (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hehijbfgiekmjfkf...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com