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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people don't get to choose what tools they can use at their place of employment. They are at the mercy of the IT department and inertia. Does it really help the world to add one more snarky comment on their day?

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The IT department's job is to enable the company's users to do their job effectively, efficiently, and securely. If that job involves visiting non-company-controlled websites, then they'll be well-served by having a modern browser.

The comment described in the post here is definitely overly insulting, but in general, making the users feel pain is one way to give the people in charge incentive to change.

(Edit: I agree that the insults are pointless, so I don't think we're really arguing about anything substantiative. That said, I'm sure this designer guy couldn't give a crap whether it's pointless or not.)

Yeah, IT has a job of optimizing the company's use of resources. I still question the idea that IE6 or IE7 are good for security, but (given more enterprise software) IE6 is generally a business requirement. Truthfully, if your company is still on IE6, then IT should have a whitelist of the sites you can visit (not a blacklist of the sites you cannot).

-- yeah, I don't think we are really disagreeing on anything substantiative

One might think that simply not having content/functionality for IE6 users would be enough incentive. As another poster said, insulting the user isn't likely to prompt a change in software.

Often times, IE6 users don't know that they are missing anything because they are on IE6 and have nothing to compare to. A message of "this feature is not supported on your browser" or, preferably, "this feature requires a modern browser with support for HTML X and CSS Y" would go a long way to communicating that, in a factual, non-confrontational way. I think the latter message is better because it gives those who would use the website a factual rationale to take to their IT departments as to why an upgrade would be good, rather than letting the IT department dismiss the website creators as IE6-hating.

Bitching about IE6 is becoming trendy. I don't even bother optimizing for IE6 cause the sites I work on will be blocked by corporate firewalls as soon as someone accesses it from inside and flagged as frivolous anyhow. Adding funny and even harsh stuff to your messages will alienate people but on the other hand will also create a following. Sometimes this is how people chose to be "different" or "original". Look at me...even I spent time to comment on this which means that he arose above the anonimity in my world.

I agree but chances are if you work at a Veteran's Hospital or whatever kind of business still mandates IE6 usage, you are going to this guy's website anyway.

Maybe people can start asking their IT departments why they are still using IE6?

Generally, they haven't upgraded because of some enterprise app that isn't updated, and most IT workers have Firefox on their machine.

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