Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Large car rental companies are not exactly cutting edge on IT. They tend to have a lot of small locations that's not exactly easy to start upgrading because of the cost of sending people out to do it all.

My local branches look like they had their last refurb in the late 90s for example.

One example does not a sample make.

View on HN

... They tend to have a lot of small locations ...

These aren't the rental outlets but their main business offices in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal & Bulgaria!

NB. The Bulgarian results shows 71% using IE6 in their main office(s).

One example does not a sample make

At no point did I say it was relevant outside my sample :)

It is not just car rental companies. Most of the UK's major banks use IE6 still.

This is because most of their intranet apps will only work in IE6, and they have the size to demand that their supplies support IE6 too. Corporate IT policy won't allow browsers apart from IE.

If only Microsoft allowed side-by-side installs of IE6 and a IE8 it might be a bit more bearable (given that IE9 is not available on XP)

This is because most of their intranet apps will only work in IE6, and they have the size to demand that their supplies support IE6 too. Corporate IT policy won't allow browsers apart from IE.

And this also seems to be the common case when I've done onsite freelancing gigs in non banking (SMB) UK companies over recent times :(

> This is because most of their intranet apps will only work in IE6

How did it ever happen that IE6 ended up in such a long lasting and dominating position? Was it (I am just guessing here) the coincidence of tho things: (1) IE6 just happened to be the most recent Microsoft browser around the time when most of bigcorps initially build their inter/intranet apps, and (2) because this was the first wave of building such things, the web coders did not bother to think about a future when IE6 is no longer a modern browser?

I think it's because IE6 is the default browser for Windows XP Installs. I think even with the later Windows XP Service Packs, they still baselined to IE6.

That and there was a big gap in time between IE6 and IE7. Didn't Microsoft once announce that IE6 would be their last browser, as that's all the world needs?

It's because IE6 was the last IE release before the end of the first browser war. Previously, Microsoft had been releasing browsers every year, but they stopped after Netscape died. It wasn't until Firefox started to gain market share, almost 5 years later, that IE7 came out. In the intervening years, IE6 had the chance to gain about 99% of the market.

(Not sure if all my figures are accurate, but that's the gist of things).

Well, part of it was that there weren't other browsers to worry about. At the time there was no Chrome, no Safari (no one used Macs in a corporate environment if there was), and no Firefox. All that you had was IE and Netscape, and Netscape was on kind of shaky ground at that point.

Those two kind of fought with each other by introducing new features that made web pages incompatible with the others. Also, even then corporations weren't really keen on letting you use some other browser, so IE was the go-to since it was already installed. Since the market was so slim, and seemed to be increasingly vanishing, it seemed easier to justify going with IE's extensions.

If Microsoft had kept updating IE and hadn't let it linger for years, we'd probably still be in the situation where they're in control of the de-facto standard. It's only because they sat with their thumb up their ass that things like Firefox and Chrome were able to get footholds and start disrupting the situation. Already being present and practically being named "The Internet" are really big adoption factors.

In addition to what others have said, don't forget that ActiveX also played a strong role. ActiveX was pretty widely used in business-oriented web applications, which hindered business adoption of firefox even among those companies or individuals who wanted to move to it.

There was also a general distrust of open source software during the time that firefox was gaining adoption. With so much malware being spread via the browser (IE6), there was a fear that firefox's open source development model and perceived immaturity were a security and support risk.

It happened because short-sighted and sloppy authors failed to use progressive enhancement over a pure HTML version that worked on every browser ever to exist. Instead they picked one browser they liked, wrote bogus code that happened to work on it, and declared "if you aren't running what I'm running, fuck you". In five or ten years we're going to be hearing the same kind of whining about how the Chrome and Firefox holdouts are holding back Web 5.0, blaming user agents when it's their own bad authoring at fault.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com