Microsoft backs long life for IE6

news.bbc.co.uk

11 points·davecardwell··6 comments

Microsoft isn't going to kill something that indirectly keeps businesses on Windows.

However, businesses that "can't justify" upgrading their software are kidding themselves. It's not even a software problem...maybe no one educated them about the realities of hardware failure. When your PCs start dying, that's a heck of a time to figure out that you can't even buy something that will run your carefully-unmaintained business software.

you can't even buy something that will run your carefully-unmaintained business software

If only making the argument was that easy; sadly, IE6 will survive as long as Microsoft still supports XP. I foresee IT departments blowing away Win7 installs left and right to install their prebuilt system images with XP / IE6. Unfortunately, support really is the deciding factor.

Well, if you are a very large company with say 40,000 seats and you have many internally developed applications that target IE6, there is a legacy that is justifiably expensive to replace.

So it is also dependent on their very large customers.

It would be funny if this turned out to have a silver lining - if co-installing IE8 and IE6 is too tricky, so they might go down the route of IE6/Chrome, esp. if Google were to offer support for enterprise customers.

I wonder if Google could cook up some sort of IE6 support? (Or just open IE6 as an ActiveX in Chrome browser tabs?)

There are comments in a thread from yesterday that seem relevant to this thread as well.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=759881

Reply on news.ycombinator.com