Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

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There are a few big differences between virus def updates and browser updates:

1) virus def updates rarely cause any problems whatsoever. Whereas browser updates are actually just the opposite. At enterprises its not uncommon that even dot releases break some apps. So those apps need to get fixed, before wide rollout.

2) Virus def updates, when they do break people, break a LOT of people very visibly. That is, if you wait a day on a virus def update, you can pretty quickly see if it broke ppl just by doing an online search. Whereas with browser updates, its a lot more difficult to tell if any of your apps will be broken with a given update.

3) Virus def updates are often fixing issues that have the potential to directly effect your business. Whereas, except for security fixes in browsers, browser updates won't have any effect on the business. It's rare that you have an app waiting to be deployed, but you're waiting on the next version of FF for a new feature or bug fix. IOW, you're taking risk, with no upside.

It's really just not the same thing at all.

At enterprises its not uncommon that even dot releases break some apps.

In my experience (nearly 15 years in enterprise development) this isn't the case at all. It used to be the case, especially with apps that used plugins or Java (both of which were common in the early 2000s), but for the most part these apps have gone now.

I think it is very, very unlikely that any non-client-Java webapp that runs in Firefox 3.x will break in any significant way in any future release.

Sometime it's not significant break, but some little difference may cause many support calls logged, depends on the organization size. And I believe many organization are still using legacy system.

I work at a big tech MNC right now. We have apps that still require IE6. These are global apps. This company is also lauded for some amazing tech. Sometimes it's just difficult to allocate the necessary resources to update an app, and sometimes it's not worth it. In other cases, all the people who made the app just moved on and there's insufficient documentation to know how the app works. The code analysis process alone would be atrocious, and companies prefer to put pressure on revenue-generating initiatives, not maintenance initiatives, because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And this is why all our computers still have IE6 installed.... @@ Fortunately, I've also got Chrome and Firefox on here because I have admin rights.

edit: Given how long mainframes have been around, is it really that much of a stretch to say that these kind of legacy web apps could still be around for a few years yet, if they're really integrated deep into an organization's processes?

We have apps that still require IE6

Yep. Hence my comment "I think it is very, very unlikely that any non-client-Java webapp that runs in Firefox 3.x will break in any significant way in any future release"

IE6-only (and IE-only) exist in the enterprise. That doesn't really impact on the Firefox upgrade strategy, since people don't use Firefox to access them.

(Also, MS is slowly dropping support for operating systems supporting IE6. Enterprises are very reluctant to use unsupported operating systems.)

Didn't all that untouchable but still working mainframe stuff at some point get stuck in an emulated window, or screen-scraped into a web app, rather than have everyone stuck on terminals forever?

It would be pretty ironic, but thanks to HTML probably not that hard, to be screen scraping an IE only web app to make it available to other web browsers.

Lots of the IE6 only "webapps" use (in part at least) ActiveX controls.

That's what makes them so hard to port - they aren't really webapps at all - just (old style, non .NET) client-server VB programs that happen to be deployed as ActiveX controls in a web page.

At some point IT will stop treating crusty enterprise web apps as web apps and start treating them as legacy enterprise apps that run in IE6.

Instead of mandating everyone run IE6 from now to eternity, IT will provide a Citrix link to launch the crusty web app inside the controlled Citrix environment, and allow users to use more modern browsers by default.

Or so we can hope.

On the other hand, bad virus updates have a habit of purging critical system files, leaving machines unbootable. They have the power to be extraordinarily destructive; good luck getting a browser to do that.

Indeed def updates can do that (and have). I wouldn't say they have a habit of it though. I've done maybe 1,000 of them in the past few years -- not one has had that hiccup.

With that said though, except for high priority zero-days, we would actually roll ours up with our other patches so we can test them all together. There's only been a couple of times where we only did a smoke test and deploy def updates -- but we always do some testing on them. Always.

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