Anti-Internet Explorer 6 protests grow with online petition

This is worrying...

I'm a little worried why so much attention is being placed on this. Surely the point of the web is to be platform independent, and any web developer worth their salt designs to web standards and not individual browsers.

The security question is also worrying. It assumes that all of the government users have direct access to the internet as a whole. I would *hope* there would be content filters etc that will block access to potentially damaging sites. And since MS are supporting the browser until 2014 I assume they will still release security patches for it. Again, I would *hope* there's a decent patch policy in place to roll these out to users...

Recommendations to update to IE7?

Surely recommending the NHS (or others) upgrade from IE6 to IE7 is like recommending they upgrade from carrier pigeons to telegrams. What's wrong with any of the range of modern browsers?

The implicit assumption that Microsoft are in some way a 'default' or ideal candidate is ludicrous. They've never shown any ability to produce a decent browser and nothing in their roadmap shows they've any plans to. For developers, designers and content producers of all kinds, it's thoroughly depressing that MS are almost being encouraged to hold up development of the internet. Nobody with any kind of public responsibility should be seen advocating IE usage in any way. Firefox, Safari, Opera, even Chrome (I just don't get Chrome) - there's a wealth of choice.

Somebody just need to use one of the IE flaws to nick

a public officials private pr0n files. That will get their attention.

BUT - IE7 will not run on W2k!

So who is going to pony up the money to upgrade 10's of thousands of machines that can't even install XP? These machines work perfectly well on W2k using intranets, and would not need to b changed but for these 'unnecessary' software problems.

OpenOffice + any decent browser, and save scrapping all these machines?

@Lester

Open office uses more memory and CPU resources than MS Office, unfortunately.

Web coders unite

If everyone removed IE6 support from their website code, there would be a big incentive for those who use it to switch to something else once people found that they could no longer browse their favourite websites.

Perhaps anything we wanted to keep secret from HMG should just be posted on sites that don't support IE6?

Another reason to use FireFox

Personally I use Firefox. For those sites that insist on MSIE, I use IETab.

The choice between IE6 with lots of security weaknesses but a sensible user interface and IE7/8 with slightly fewer security flaws but a user interface that deliberately put the buttons that I use most at the far corners of the screen (and doesn't allow me to configure them any other way) would be hard to make.

@AndrueC

"Windows works out of the box on every bit of hardware it claims to."

It doesn't claim to run on much -- XP is 8 years out of date and surprisingly SP1, SP2, SP3 did not add more recent drivers, and Vista and 7 dropped support for older hardware. XP being the bigger problem of the two -- seriously, try installing XP on something, you are HIGHLY *HIGHLY* likely to find you have no ethernet drivers, no sound drivers, and 640x480 video, and (if it has it) no wireless. You may have to shove in a driver disk just to install since XP also has no SATA drivers. And 7, you can't really count on installing it on some older system and have it work -- there's a lot of older stuff it does not support. I can plug the same Ubuntu CD into anything from a Pentium 2 through a Core 2 (and I'm sure newer stuff), and EVERYTHING works out of the box. IMHO the biggest weakness traditionally was wireless (it's improved recently), Ubuntu includes a package to install Windows wireless drivers if needed, right off the Windows driver CD!

" On the rare occasion when an obscure device doesn't have a driver you can be sure to download it and get it installed without having to rebuild the kernel or break into a sweat."

Not rare at all! And Linux has modules, so for the few items that do not have out-of-the-box support (but do have a driver available), for most distros you click it off a list, it does download source and build it but the package does the work for you, and since it's a module there's no kernel rebuild required. The nvidia driver for one does this.

"Linux might be better for techies and geeks but for most people Windows is easier."

You may not have used recent distros. I find people are afraid of ditching Windows, but (unless they use Quickbooks or something that really does need Windows), once they do ditch Windows they actually find Ubuntu to be easier than Windows. A few people I know were hardcore into Windows, they still have Windows but now they dual-boot, basically using Windows for games.

--------------------

That said... this really isn't about ditching Windows. They should absolutely ditch IE6 either way! It's just not secure. UK.gov is foolish for thinking some setup + Microsoft patches will help them, I didn't think Microsoft was even patching every hole in IE6 in favor of patching IE7 and IE8.

I am not a Windblows basher by any means

But having to write javascript that runs on exploder makes me cringe.

(welcome to my world.)

SVG

Just a little point in favour of IE6.

The old adobe SVG browser plugin worked with IE6 and gave reasonable results for embedded SVGs in web pages. As I recall, when adobe dropped support for their plugin ("all reasonable browsers have native SVG support built in") some years ago, IE7 and IE8 didn't exist and therefore don't work.

Embedded SVG was a good way to crash IE7 in some quite entertaining ways. I haven't tried it with IE8.

I think microsoft are considering adding SVG support to IE9 or 10, so in the meantime if you must access websites using important internet standards you should either use IE6 and the unsupported plugin or any other browser released in the last 5 years.

Usual Problem

There are an awful lot of apps out there that will only run on IE6. One of our suppliers is a major corporate and their helpdesk app runs only on IE6. Anybody who uses that app has to use IE6. Here in IT we have no influence over the supplier. Senior management have no real leverage because we are tied into a term contract and this in no way consitutes a breach. Worse still the helpdesk app was developed by another large company which puts the whole thing at one remove. So some of our users are stuck using IE6 until our suppliers change the helpdesk app or the contract ends.

I suspect that UK.gov are in the same boat. They can't start throwing their weight around with suppliers because no doubt that would contravene EU procurement laws.

The particular vuln that upset Google is stymied by our IPS so we're protected, but the worry is that sooner or later something will come along that the IPS can't cope with. It's also a pain supporting a handful of IE6 installs, not to mention dealing with all the shit that won't run on IE6 and making sure group policies and the like don't break IE6. Not forgetting making sure some idiot on the helpdesk doesn't "helpfully" upgrade the EU to IE8.

Developers royally screwed their customers when they fell for MS's spin on broswer tech. MS made IE6 as non-standard as possible to try to tie developers and their customers into IE and also kill off the competion. The thinking presumably being that if they could get enough of the interwebs to be IE compatible only then the rest would surely follow. Then MS changed their minds (presumably at the thought of anti-trust action) and left those developers and their customers out in the cold come IE7.

a title.

Thank goodness I work for an institution with linux on the desktop! But having said that some of our websites still have to support IE6 (hopefully not for much longer) as our resources are used heavily by the NHS, which as we all know is still living in the interwebs equivalent of the dark ages.