A few people in this thread (and elsewhere when the topic of IE6 comes up) bring up the problem of applications that are dependent on IE6 as a reason why many business users cannot upgrade.
I'm curious, does anyone have any actual experience with such applications? Do you use them yourself? Do you work for a company that uses them? Did you develop them? Are you aware of any statistics that cite how prevalent these applications are?
I'm beginning to wonder whether these IE6-dependent applications are widespread in reality, or whether they server more as a rhetorical rejoinder anytime someone brings up the idea of forcing people to upgrade.
It certainly feels more and more to me like progress on web applications is being highjacked by an extremely small minority of enterprise IT departments.
The company I work for uses IE 7 standards for rendering within our application. A lot of things would break if the people using our software upgraded to IE 8.
Actually, there's one simple meta tag ("X-UA-Compatible") you can add to the head of your pages that will make IE8 use the IE7-compatible rendering engine:
You can also add the HTTP header to the response for these pages so you don't even have to touch the markup, just a configuration file on the Web server.
Sure. The company I current work for, who consider themselves a leader in online optimization, have all of our HR details on a 3rd party IE6 only site (https://www6.intersourcing.com/www/templates/utilities/TreeV...). So anytime I want to view my paycheck I have to fire up VMWare on the Mac.
My last company refused to install IE7 on the corporate images and only allowed people to use IE6. You can imagine that as someone developing internal web-based tools this was quite frustrating.
I'm curious, does anyone have any actual experience with such applications? Do you use them yourself? Do you work for a company that uses them? Did you develop them? Are you aware of any statistics that cite how prevalent these applications are?
I'm beginning to wonder whether these IE6-dependent applications are widespread in reality, or whether they server more as a rhetorical rejoinder anytime someone brings up the idea of forcing people to upgrade.
It certainly feels more and more to me like progress on web applications is being highjacked by an extremely small minority of enterprise IT departments.