Hacker News Reader

Comment by aichcon | Hacker News Reader

The problem is internal legacy applications that only work in IE6. If they upgrade browsers the apps break, so in order to support these apps they keep IE 6. The question for them is 'do we spend time and money to update all of our applications to upgrade a browser, or just leave things the way they are for now?'

View on HN

Sometimes the question isn't even "do we spend time and money to update our applications", because sometimes the code for the applications is long gone, along with the company that wrote it, and all they have left is the compiled code running on some server in a back closet.

This was the reasoning that led to Java's ascendancy in the enterprise and the 1996-2000 tech boom. Companies were stuck with Y2K-incompliant COBOL software that they no longer had the expertise (or sometimes even the source code) for, and they had a hard constraint of Jan 1, 2000 that they had to hit. So many of them threw away their existing software entirely and rewrote it all in Java. The resulting IT spending fueled the tech boom of the late 1990s, led to the rise of the Indian outsourcing industry, and resulted in widespread adoption of Java EE.

We're in a recession now. There're a bunch of unemployed web developers. Let's simply ban the use of IE6 and kill two birds with one stone! Break some windows and burn those diskpacks, baby!

Oh nostrademons... You always know exactly how to fuel the fire.

Maybe we should organize "ie6aholics annonymous"?

Couldn't they install Firefox, then, and use IE6 for legacy apps?

hell, back when I used to work for more restrictive companies I was still able to download the zip version of firefox, unzip it into ~mydocuments, and run it from there.

How about Virtual Box to run IE6?

How about the cost of a Windows license?

How about Ubuntu and IEs4linux? Nothing like a few more layers of abstraction.

That's exactly the situation we had at the place I used to work. Management believed it was better to deal with the limitations of legacy software than with the expense of modernizing it. As of 2006, when I left, they were even still using Windows 98 on a handful of PCs because there was no reliable way to get all the data out of one of the applications and the software vendor had gone out of business.

Same reply here as below: "Sorry, that's not an excuse. IE 8 comes with a "compatibility mode" feature where any site can choose to use the IE 6 rendering engine by setting headers or meta tags appropriately."

Nope.. that compatibility mode is for IE7, not IE6. (And my understanding is that it's not even a perfect emulation of IE7.)

Microsoft's official recommendation for developers is to install IE6 in a VM if you need to test compatibility. It's that bad.

Hmm, you're right. Somehow that didn't make it into the final release. What a shame.

Either way, our perspective is still that the more people that complain about IE 6, the more pressure IT departments will have to upgrade their systems.

Starting with Firefox for a modern browsing experience wouldn't be a bad idea :)

And an antediluvian management experience. Official MSIs with transforms and group policy templates for configuration please.

(e.g. group policy configure location and size of cache, proxy settings, location of profile folder, restrictions on plugin installation, items to add to favourites, home page configuration, default plugins to install, disable update checking if they wont have rights to install them, etc).

Speaking of which, do you know where I can find IE 6 so I can install it in a VM and test our site?

MultipleIE doesn't work on Windows 7, which is what I'm using.

Dunno about Win7 compatibility, but this is the official VPC image: http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21e...

Personally, I'd probably just use a VMWare image of XP or Win98 and download IE6 from here http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1E1...

Some compatibility problems don't regard HTML, so this compatibility mode is irrelevant - for instance in COM apps using the IE browser control, upgrades to IE7/8 are known to cause problems.

I agree and I face this problem. Generally I circumvent this by firebugs capabilities to edit the HTML dynamically, but it has to be done too frequently end up uninstalling IE8. and installing it again at a later point. IT department thinks that IE7 does not make the security cut .. I dont know the specifics of security cut.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com