

IE6 is not going away for a long time because of corporate nightmares like these - chime
http://calink.sprint.com/phase1

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tybris
Realism? On Hacker News? I thought we had all agreed to act as if IT consists
entirely of web start-ups with no such thing as legacy, even though that's
probably 99% of the pie.

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derefr
Why can't Microsoft simply take the IE6 codebase and refactor it into a
static, standalone "Legacy Intranet Browser" that, similar to Mozilla Prism,
will generate a locked-in "site launcher" for each site it must be used on?

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adbachman
Done (more or less). IE6 application compatibility virtual PC image:
[http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21E...](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en)

I use it at work to test our sites against IE6. Boots in about 5 seconds and
runs IE6 as well as can be expected.

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eli
Not gonna work if the whole reason for needing IE6 was some ActiveX control
that interacts with your desktop.

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briansmith
That is why Windows 7 has a mostly-seemless Windows XP virtualization add-on.

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seasoup
There are unfortunately ALOT of corporate programs that will only run on IE6.
At work, our main app is optimized for IE6 but we are trying to ween our
customers off of it and onto IE7... but all IE7 bugs are P2s at worst because
IE6 is what our customers are using.

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patio11
At the day job, legacy installations mean IE6 compatibility is a requirement
and all other compatibility is a luxury. I prioritize accordingly.

Its not like I can tell my customer "Look, I know telling you to upgrade your
browser is going to break that 3 million dollar CRM system you've been using
for the last 8 years... but you'll get transparent PNGs!"

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btipling
Well eventually the argument will be "You'll be able to use the real
internet!"

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blasdel
This has nothing to do with IE6's rendering engine, and everything to do with
ActiveX.

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chime
Absolutely. Now if you're a small vendor, you have no choice but to downgrade
all your computers to IE6 in order to enable your employees to access business
critical information. Because of how complex the configuration is, running IE6
in parallel with IE7/8 with hacks will not work. And there is no other way to
access this data. So now even though other browsers might be installed, most
users will use IE6 for regular browsing. I want IE6 to die but I'm afraid
it'll be a while.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I run IE6 (an a virtualbox VM with WinXP) alongside IE8 and FF, Saf, Op,
Chrome, etc., for testing purposes. It even runs IE5, IE4 but I don't have to
bother with them except when I want a laugh.

MultipleIE (from tredosoft.com), simples.

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Pistos2
So I guess I'm blessed that my workplace's intranet is coded to Firefox, and
we dropped support for IE6 for our customer-facing sites a year ago?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
If it's "coded to Firefox" then they're doing it wrong. If it's coded to web
standards and only FF is supported, that's a different matter.

Suppose a patent problem came up (as with GIFs in the past) and FF couldn't be
used legally any more. If you code to FF you'll probably find you're OK, but
if you code to standards then any standards compliant browser should be a
drop-in replacement.

~~~
Pistos2
It's coded so that we only have to check if it works in Firefox. It's not like
we're explicitly trying to leverage Firefox-only markup or CSS. I believe the
idea is to reduce waste of development time and effort. I think I'm going to
call YAGNI at this point re: future patent problems. I don't see that
happening soon, and I'd gladly take the time savings now, and cross that
bridge when we get to it -- if it comes at all.

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nexneo
Not surprisingly, above page created in MS Word. What one can expect further.

<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 12"> <meta name=Originator
content="Microsoft Word 12">

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paulitex
Oh god that's depressing.

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geedee77
I work for a major law firm (think top 6 worldwide) and we run a DM system
that requires IE6 only (ie, doesn't work in IE7 even) so every office
worldwide is tied into IE6.

Only recently have we started rewriting it to work in newer browsers ... and I
don't expect a working prototype before middle of next year!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The docs and metadata are in a DB, just have a new frontend written to match
the old UI but with knobs on. Should be done and ready to test by next weekend
(inside joke ;0).

Or just get an OSS DM system and munge it together with the old DB. Perhaps
knowledgetree would be a starting point for that.

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ars
What is special about IE6 that doesn't work on other versions?

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seasoup
A lot of things about IE6 are not standards compliant, so it's either programs
for both or program for just IE6 and there is never enough time/resources to
develop for both.

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ars
I thought the later IE's had special rendering compatibility modes that do the
same as IE6.

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ivank
The same as IE7.

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cubicle67
I can't see a date anywhere. Does anyone know how old this is (please,
_please_ don't say it's current)?

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bvttf
view source:

    
    
       <o:Created>2009-04-10T21:20:00Z</o:Created>
       <o:LastSaved>2009-04-10T21:56:00Z</o:LastSaved>

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wglb
Insanity.

~~~
redcap
Maybe, but as numerous people have said before, there are likely thousands of
businesses that have internal websites that only work with IE6.

~~~
wglb
Agreed, and quite expensive to rewrite.

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CamperBob
Why doesn't somebody just write a goddamn dedicated IE6 emulator and be done
with it...

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rwebb
what's the big deal? looks like a nice site.

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clemesha
It's either us or them - personally, I choose the former.

