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Comment by hendrik-xdest | Hacker News Reader

And here I thought that all non-updated IE versions were installed in environments where Sysadmins blocked the updates (and will in the future). It would be interesting to see a number of how many installations this change could really target. Like, how many IE 6 to 8 are actually in the wild. Can't be that much, imho.

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The great majority of IE6 installations today are in China [1], and I presume that is a region where _personal_ installs of IE6 still are quite prevalent. Of course, these people could have updated if they wanted, and this change won't affect IE6, so it's still a great challenge to get people to modernize.

[1] http://www.ie6countdown.com/

I thought so too, and it fits with what I've seen in large, charge-adverse companies. In fact, today I told a user that our site won't look its best or run quickly in IE7, which he's stuck with at $BigCo client site.

In my current experience, there are very few IE6 installations left in these corporates. There are some IE7, and a whole lot of IE8.

Should the headline read "Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone ... except most of them" ?

>> Sysadmins blocked the updates

There's something about this that really bothers me, maybe someone can better clarify.

Why are admins enforcing a policy that leaves the company target to just about every possible security hole that has been fixed in the past 20 years?

Is there a valid reason for this that I'm unaware of?

Define valid. The reason in the giant organization that I work in is broken internal applications. The number of internally deployed web apps that were targetted for IE6 and nothing else is truly astonishing. And the speed with which they get updated is astonishing as well. We finally deployed IE8 this year after almost 2 years of remediation effort. Which just kills me. (And of course because of thinking about security harkens back to the 1960s, we are a full year into exploring the deployment of Chrome or Firefox as a supplemental browser, but at present it is too risky)

Large corporations run lots of browser-based applications. To upgrade these applications, or even to regression test them - even in virtual environments - costs money. Any money they spend on IT comes out of their profits, or is added onto their prices. Would you pay an extra 5 bucks to buy your car insurance from a company that has ditched IE6?

There are quite a lot of companies that have applications that rely on IE6. I, personally, know of a few financial institutions that can't update. This might not be necessarily related to their systems not being able to work with a newer version, though. Some office drones are just incapable of doing there job if the color of a button changes. I kid you not.

Other companies have a long(!) cycle when evaluating new software releases. I have heard of an insurance provider that rolled out IE7 just this year.

I work for a local-government IT department in the DC area. We're on IE7, but we have automatic updates turned off.

At first, a few years ago, it was because there was one specific update that broke our Oracle software, so everything got turned off. Now, we keep them off because of inertia. We started pushing out selected security updates in the last few months because the security folks insisted.

Oddly, it's our policy to install the full set of updates (except IE8) to all machines that have issues. We also update our images with all the latest stuff from Microsoft Updates.

Legacy applications. When you have invested on applications that sadly work only on IE6, then you have no choice but to block the updates. It would be great if windows can run different versions of IE on the same machine, or even at the same time.

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