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Comment by ceol | Hacker News Reader

I doubt their userbase using IE7 is large enough for this to be a big deal. This tax's real goal is PR for Kogan.

Maybe not for Kogan, but most of the DOD is still on IE6, as an example that is something like 2 million daily users.

Uber large business and government is were the users are hiding. The reason the numbers are still off is because those same users are using chrome at there house in the evening.

There should be a business only metric for browser usage. That would be very interesting.

No, DoD switched from IE6 several years ago.

Many government offices now have firefox too. Not sure about the ones with higher security concerns, but I know the normal security places have FF.

And to be fair, the divisions in which we're talking about high levels of security aren't using those browsers on the internet anyway, they're locked away in SCIFFs, accessing internal-only applications.

> Maybe not for Kogan, but most of the DOD is still on IE6, as an example that is something like 2 million daily users.

With each passing day, this statement made less and less sense to a point of absurd. And that point has been reached a long time ago.

I work for Department of Interior (the armpit when compared to DOD) and here its either fully patched IE8, latest Firefox or you are booted off of network. Can DOD be really that archaic and still allow employees to browse wild wild web with IE6?

I am not part of the DoD, but as I understand it a lot of entrenched usage of IE6 these days is usually internal apps. So, perhaps they use IE6 for private networks, and use IE8, Firefox, et al for public-facing workstations.

But IE6 won't even run on new versions of Windows. You'd need to run up a VM on a user's machine with a copy of XP.

What's the refresh cycle at DoD? Two decades?

So, you just keep using XP.

They probably have internal interfaces that aren't forward compatible, and re-factoring anything inside the DoD has got to be stupid expensive.

I don't know the internals of the DOD, but I bet that it's not too much for the costs (that doesn't seem to be a big problem there), but the human resources being used in other priorities.

If you have thousands of machines running an OS that works perfectly well for your purposes, then you only upgrade when support lapses, which is 2014 in this case.

I'm not buying it. This is the reason always given, and in real life I've not come across this as the actual reason. 99% of the time it is lack of staff and will not lack of "We don't know how to make the adjustments to make it work."

I've also seen universities with faculty and staff still using IE7 not because of infrastructure requirements, but just because nobody had come around to upgrade because they hadn't bitched loudly enough.

What's the difference? There's no compelling business reason to upgrade.

IE6 isn't the only XP-only app I have to use in my daily job, so it's entirely feasible that members of the DoD are still using XP.

At the large research university I work at in a lab, almost all of the computers run XP, and a few even run Windows 2000. Is it frustrating to use IE6 on the Windows 2000 computer? Yes. However, the software for the old equipment we have is designed for Windows 2000, and most likely will never be upgraded, for lack of support for newer OSs. I don't think (anecdotal evidence) that a 10-15 year refresh cycle is absurd on some machines. That being said, for the entire DoD to not at least update some of their workstations is a little incredible.

It's certainly not the entire DoD. Firefox is explicitly supported on most new sites, with specialized plugins available that simplify security setup (install certs, CAC access).

I'm working on a project for a major bank here in the UK, one of the requirements of IE6 and no Javascript. Seriously. It's anal. But it's how their system runs internally, so for management to be able to "test" the new site it needs to work in IE6.

What I don't understand is the bank should be promoting use of latest technology. If your online account was robbed of all it's money and they found out yuo are using IE6 (with all its security flaws) what's the likelihood they try to say it was your own fault?

I don't know about the rest of the DoD, but I know that most of the fire brigades on Marine Corps and Army bases are using IE7 or Firefox.

But I don't think their CAC-managed systems allow them access to the web at large.

I've seen some numbers that are nearly all business users. They've actually improved considerably in the last year or two. IE6 was quite common in certain sectors like government, finance, healthcare, (see if you can guess what those industries have in common) but in late 2010 and early 2011 people finally really started upgrading either to newer versions of IE or, surprisingly, Firefox.

IE6 use (even among business) is extremely rare right now. Which makes sense, because very few websites would actually work.

"Uber large business and government is were the users are hiding"

Agreed. About 1/3 of our users - all of whom are insurers or brokers - use IR7

It's not just large businesses. About 1/3 of our users use IE7, although thankfully there's hardly anyone still on IE6. About 1/2 are still on XP (NT 5.1). Some of these are small companies with <10 employees.

Don't forget third-world countries that largely rely on XP. IIRC as of about a year ago, a double-digit percentage of asia was still on XP.

A double digit percentage overall is still on XP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

I would imagine the proportion of DOD users going to an Australia electronics shopping site would be 0.0000000001% of Kogan's total user base.

I suspect your estimate is off by a few orders of magnitude. Unless Kogan's user base is larger than the total population of Earth (I know you're out there), then even one of them from the DoD would represent 0.000000014%.

For one of our clients they had 100k+ hits from IE6/7 alone in the last 30 days. It's not that uncommon a browser, no matter how much it should be.

Ford Motor Company as of a year ago was 100% IE 6. There was talk of change, but all the internal apps only work in IE 6.

It's about converting one IE7 user at a time.

Either way, I bet the developers had fun with this feature.

As a developer supporting IE7, I definitely see this feature as a powerful release valve for frustrated developer. A little way of management to say to the dev team, "we understand your pain"

Kogan seem to be very good at attracting attention like this.

I did not even open the post, and did not know what Kogan is: I just looked at the title of the post on HN and said to myself: What a great PR idea!

I work for a site which gets a lot of traffic from mainstream Australia (ie we're not in the tech space).

We still get a significant amount of traffic from IE7.

Can't it be both?

True enough. But how many hours of life has ie sucked from developers? I mean ms purposefully held back the development of multiple internet standards, they deserve what they get imho, ideals or not.

If you are a good front developer then fixing ie7 issues shouldn't be an issue or take you long to fix!

For html5 use the html5 boiler plate and ensure your code validates. Also do not use floats to position everything, only elements that need to flow with the contents of the document. Use position absolute for elements that are static and of course in the block that holds said elements add position relative. Using too many floats is bound to make you hating ie7 even more.

I think you're missing the point. We're all tired of making one version for normal browsers and a bunch of special fixes for six year old browsers nobody should be using anymore. We're all tired of having to constrain the development techniques we use to make it easy to support six year old browsers nobody should be using anymore. We're all tired of thinking about six year old browsers nobody should be using anymore.

This. it also makes doing things that were not thought of in 2000 nearly impossible. popovers , css3, JavaScript, And animAtion libraries all have problems. its not just a bunch of zoom 1 fixes anymore. the web has moved on. display bugs are not the only problem

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