Why a long protracted roll out?

Send the update to every computer on the domain on Tuesday evening, everyone will have IE8 by Wednesday morning.

It's hardly rocket science is it.

What's all this about intranets not working? They more than likely work fine on new browsers, people are just too stubborn to change.

not just uk gov

I'm with a local authority. Last year I asked if there were any plans afoot to upgrade to IE7, and the response I recieved was, there are no plans.

I'm sure there's a best practice reason - they always churn out one of those when they want to fight a logical and sensible decision.

We're on IE 7!

Anon because of work, but we're on IE 7. We're still on Win XP, mind you, and we haven't had Service Pack 3 installed because it's 'still being tested'.

When I recently requested my department bought in some specialist software, I was pointed to an open-source 'equivalent'. When I suggested I install it and see if it was any good, I was told (by the same person) that I wouldn't be allowed to install it on the office system.

So the fact that a lot of our government is running old stuff isn't actually a surprise. Things move slowly and oddly here.

Trust Us!

And the government expect us to trust them with our personal data? lol What a joke when they won't even take the time to use up to date and secure applications.

IE7? *slow clap*

They moved from one out-of-date browser to a second out-of-date browser (and one that is not even standards compliant). Well done, yes indeed, very well done there.

Morons.

tell me about it

As a government employee who builds a lot of intranet pages and rolls out other companies web front ends (apparantly they are all the rage donchaknow) i cant tell you how bizarre it is that every other IT system is on a more up to date release than the main client tool used by everyone. It is 8 years old...there are 2 new versions. Luckily our virus checking software is not treated the same way.

Newer browsers may be better for surfing the web...

But many government IT systems I've had experience of are still tied into shoddily written intranet systems that downright refuse to work properly in any browser that isn't an old version of Internet Explorer laden with ActiveX. Some of them provide a limited subset of features for users of Netscape Navigator(!)

If you want to use Firefox or any Webkit-based browser you're out of luck as the apps in question are often coded to reject outright any browser other than the versions of IE they were designed for.

W2K

the OS is at fault here sadly, lots of people still use W2K as their main O/S. So no ie7 for them!

It's too expensive to upgrade to Vista just to get a newer browser.

Never

Doing a bit of digging here at a government quago it would seem that IE6 is going to be replaced early 2010 due a change of supplier.

I could only guess, if it were not for a new supplier of IT systems, we would have had IE6 for at least another 2 years.

Got to love the government

Yup.

Agree with all the above. As a local gov IT person, I first put Firefox on my system because of the security issues I was aware of at the time with IE6. That was nearly five years ago. Now, with such ploys as Government Connect bearing down on us, we are still stuck on IE6 and, more laughably, we are being threatened for using anything else, including IE7 onwards or Firefox, to the point where we are being told of possible implications if we don't get rid of it.

I can sympathise with the folk at Orange for once!

pah

having worked previously in the local government outsourcing sector, we used to "try" to flog a customer relationship and call logging database supposedly based on web standards that would run on any browser to local council call centers. it only ran on ie 6 properly and was scrapped internally for sage as everyone hated it that much.

when buying from the lowest bider what can you expect but software that was developed with every conceivable corner cut.

Remember...

...as well as systems that we have, some of us have live with systems specified by other suppliers (who can't code to save their lives, or deliver items so late the rest of us just shake our heads)... or it breaks the application people are using.

Remember, it takes time to test. And the bad news is that testing time is one of the few resources some of us don't have.

Broken application or a Broken browser? I know which I'd unhappily choose.

IEEEE - WTF! Why windows?

So, all our poll tax goes down the microsoft drain via the local authorities, and they still wont protect public data correctly by using a better web browser? What are they doing online anyway? Our local council claims to have invested a big chunk of money into having all records held in a database - and assuming that the onus should be on efficiency and security I fail to see why they are even using windows!

Perhaps we're not supposed to consider how money they would save by dumping windows?

Firefox with IETab

First of all, I work in a company that has also IE6 as 'standard' - oh the irony...

Anyway, even on a locked down machine, you can install Firefox as it doesn't touch the registry at all. Once you've got that, install an Add-on called IETab, and use that one to load the badly written IE-only websites you no doubt have to work with (I know I have!)

You can make a list of the websites (domains) you want to always open in IETab, so for those internal websites - with which they 'check' which browser you're using anyway - will happily load in IE6 automatically while you can use normal Firefox for everything else.

We have an internal intranet-site which is IE-only, so that one thinks everything is ok as it loads in a Firefox-tab using the IE-engine. Problem solved.

Best of luck.

@Number6

Can you give more details regarding what doesn't work? I'm compiling a list

Keep the fancy stuff on the servers

Sometimes I yearn for the days of Netscape 1.22 when HTML was simple enough to write by hand, Javascript didn't exist, nor frames, nor CSS, nor Java, nor ActiveX. And there were no popups. Admittedly, fancy layout had to be managed by abusing the tables feature, but then is "fancy layout" mission critical?

Yet even in those halcyon, far-off times, online commerce was a reality and honestly, very little we do today couldn't be done then. Or so it seems. A golden age in retrospect.

I'm not at all sure we've really progressed, except for online video via Flash.

@AC 13:51

"Perhaps we're not supposed to consider how money they would save by dumping windows?"

In short the answer is none, you'd actually end up spending more money in the short to medium term because training costs would wipe out any savings you were thinking of making and most Councils are under resourced as it is so there'd be even more costs getting any legacy apps to work on something other than windows, those costs would always be spent mostly on consultants again because of the resource issue.

Those that actually 'work' in public sector usually fight long and hard to get stuff done, while the rest just doss around acruing flexi time.

Firefox stats over rated

I run a website used by government agencies (yes, IE6) and also accessed directly by the public. This month IE7 is taking 35% of hits and IE8 22% - presumably because Microsoft are nagging Windows users at home to upgrade. IE6 takes 17%.

Firefox 3 is only on 15%. Sadly Opera only gets 0.5% of hits. I think this reflects reality more than stats from w3schools.com as theirs is a site for techies, not for Mr & Mrs Average.

How many people work in the public sector?

About half of them.

Also, regarding "Firefox stats overrated" - the page at w3schools says exactly that beneath the figures.

@AC: Trust Us!

> What a joke when they won't even take the time to use up to date and secure applications.

It's not that we haven't got lots of time, course we have. Loads of time. It's not like we're running health services or military operations or anything... We just don't have lots of YOUR money to bung to expensive outsourced IS "partners" to upgrade tens of thousands of desktops. If you would like to volunteer more of your money for this noble purpose, please make cheques payable to HM Treasury and post to the Rt Hon Alastair Darling MP PC, 11 Downing St.

As someone who writes webapps...

...I absolutely loathe and detest IE6 (and IE7, if I'm honest). Unfortunately, we have no choice to support it because almost all of out client base (banks) are still using it. The users would get a much better experience if they could run our software on a modern browser, but it seems that even asking about the possibility of upgrading isn't allowed for them.

And in reply to the comment:

"Because "supplier X" who ships a critical LOB app will only support it on IE7 not IE8, we get that sort of issue all the time round here"

We're caught between a rock and a hard place - we simply can't use non IE6 features as our clients would refuse to install it.

Next G20, I'm tempted to walk round with a banner saying "Ban IE"...

@Gordon Jahn

Writing web apps that *don't* use proprietary Microsoft technologies is made extremely hard by the various appalling kludges necessary to do anything complex in versions of IE.

And don't get me started on Microsoft's attitude to javascript performance

I hate it but understand it

I hate IE6, it's horrible and thankfully at home we're an all Debian shop, so no nasty Microsoft applications to worry about however at work we're an XP/IE6 shop.

For historically reasons I have local admin rights at work and have been allowed to install Firefox and almost never use IE at all. Even the IT department mostly use Firefox at home or work. Company policy is very adamant that it's officially IE6 or nothing for most users though...

We do not have a lot of intranet applications but those that we have look like they were designed by a dog and coded by a cat. They are utter crap but they sort of work with IE6 and it is impossible for us to move off to something more modern and stable such as IE8 or Firefox.

The irony is that as new web applications are introduced they are forced to support the IE6 company standard not anything vaguely modern. It's getting harder not easier to upgrade! I bet it's the same for so many companies, lots of expensive and poorly written applications with crappy web interfaces and very slow upgrade cycles.

On a personal level, my servers gets about 10 times as many IE6 visits as IE7, which in turn gets about 10 times as many visits as IE8. So though I've seen lots of people claim that IE8 has replaced IE7 which in turn replaced IE6, I'm not convinced. At least the Firefox, Opera and Konqeror visitors are mostly on the latest versions, those browsers do seem to be always up to date. I don't know about Safari or Chrome no one seem to visit with them.

haha!

Apart from rubbish performance, dire UI, and painfull development\support (involving a random mix of technologies), this is another good reason why internal systems should not be web based.

How many companies actually have a thin client computers where the use of web browsers actually makes sense over a 'traditional' application? What possible advantage is there? Great, have this massive thin based accounting system which ties you to a browser and will probably be in use way past the browser going 'out of support' and thus a massive security risk. I dont understand. I honestly dont. Sure, do it if you dont know what platform your applciation will be delivered to, but your a company, Ill wager all the machines are windows!

Maybe I've missed something...

too lazy, too busy or too brittle?

There are three possibilities as to why I(dio)T Departments don't deploy a more modern browser.

The first is that they are too lazy to do it.

The second is that perhaps they are way too busy putting out Windows spot-fires.

The most likely reason, however, is that Windows is so brittle, they dare not mess with the SOE (standard operating environment) for fear of breaking all sorts of things.

When our office upgraded to XP from Win2K, plus whatever version of Office that went with that and all sorts of back end stuff, files in user accounts became corrupted or simply vanished into thin air. When staff attempted to retrieve their documents from backups, they too became corrupted or did the vanishing act.

You should have seen all the staff jumping up and down like frogs on a hot plate. I endeared myself to management by laughing my head off, saying it served them right for trusting Microsoft with their data.

Whoops!

IE is too unsafe.

> IE is simply too unsafe, and can't be updated without intrusive and potentially dangerous updates to the whole system.

Sorry this is total BS (from a happy Firefox user). All browsers are unsafe, whether they are up to date or not. If you are not updating your OS with security updates because you deem this "unsafe" then you are in a paradox. You should be sacked for having such non realistic perceptions :).

Petard, HOIST!

Microsoft sure cam make me chuckle sometimes. After spending the better part of two decades trying to vendor lock their client base they now discover that they've done such a good job of it that they've manage to lock all their clients in to a legacy OS and their customers can't even migrate on to Microsofts own latest versions.

LOL!

Sooner or later these numpties will *have* to upgrade to something newer. In the long run it might in fact be easier to migrate to FF with IETAB.

As for that AC who is banging on that ol' "training costs" drum, how much will it cost to retrain windows staffers to move from XP and Office2K3 to W7 with Office 2010?

Oh that's right, their both Microsoft so training is not required.

Right.