BTW I just realized that site is actually owned and operated by Microsoft.
Have there been other products where companies practically beg people to stop using it and fund initiatives to that end?
Have there been other products where companies practically beg people to stop using it and fund initiatives to that end?
(I'd like to see priceonomics write a blog post about the razor blade model)
http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-...
But they definitely push for whatever is the newest (and usually more expensive) option.
1. can't be set to be the default browser;
2. has no address bar, bookmarks menu, or any other "user navigation" feature besides interacting with the pages themselves;
3. and, most importantly, requires a GPO for each set of Intranet domains you want to grant it access to, with a hard-coded start page. All navigation to domains outside the allowed list would trigger the default (modern) browser to open the link instead.
This effectively would make IE6 not a web browser, but just another runtime for ordinary installable software, which just happens to run mostly by loading external code from the web. (Sort of like node-webkit, actually.) Microsoft could re-brand it, with their usual flare, as the "Legacy Intranet Services Application Framework", and tout it as a "transition tool" for any enterprise "lagging behind."
All the people needing IE6 for something could safely upgrade to a new OS, knowing their old web-apps would continue working for as long as LISAF is supported; and all the people developing for the web would be released from the burden of seeing IE6 outside an Intranet ever again.
But a browser doesn't get stuck in time like a OS does when it dies, they don't surf on the same Web as when they were popular while an old outdated OS still runs its old outdated software just fine. MS-DOS and Win16 also weren't garbage, IE6 is.
But you're very right about the legacy applications. We seem to have been able to at least upgrade to IE8...still not that good though.
There are so many downsides, but what's the upside? So that FB loads a little faster? The incentives are stacked against adopting new technology. Any new browser has to be thoroughly tested against every one of the company's apps to make sure that nothing breaks. As anyone who's done QA before will tell you, that's a tall order.
I agree that the probability of such an incident is small. However, given the disastrous consequences that would happen for a large organization should such a bug occur, it's hard to make the case that an upgrade is a good idea for the sake of "better technology."
My memory isn't that hazy. What happened was that people said the software only had to run in IE6 and Netscape wasn't important. Writing "good" web software wasn't important. Simply support Microsoft's IE6 and you're done. If you're still stuck on IE6/IE7 it really is your own fault.
1) IT departments are massively conservative (and this is not an intrinsically bad thing)
2) A lot of apps were built specifically for IE6. They still work with IE6. Many times they only work with IE6.
3) It hasn't been made worthwhile to upgrade.
> If you're still stuck on IE6/IE7 it really is your own fault.
A lot of us web developers have decided to just say, "Fuck it," and stop supporting IE6. If it works, cool; if it doesn't, we don't care. This is a luxury available to those of us who have clients who aren't supported by the aforementioned IT departments. Some of us are still required to support IE6 because we have clients who we can't drop and refuse to move off, and we don't have the leverage to persuade them otherwise.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms970405.aspx
If your entire application was created like that then you are talking about a significant overhaul.
When persuading a client to drop explicit IE6 support they said "but x00000 hits are using IE6", we looked into the stats and the vast majority of the IE6 traffic was coming from China and not buying anything.