Keep the focus where it belongs
".. because our IT dept cannot roll-out anything else due to apps that were written for IE 6 , combined witha total hatred of anything not MS such as Firefox."
"If it needs worms and viruses to force people to dump it then so be it. "
and others bemoaning lazy developers.
You need to think about IT in a large corporation, not just as a home user. They are completely different things and from some of the quotes on here not everyone understands that.
To some it is as simple as "just download <insert browser of choice> and the world will be a better place. That might work for home and novice users. However, corporate environments are usually (should be!) pretty locked down and users can't do that. Only the IT department can do that and they were involved in commissioning applications years ago, which they were assured by MS and others that the best way to future proof was to code to IE6 which was ubiquitous. Of course it became apparent that IE6 despite being ubiqitous did not conform to standards other than the MS "extended" ones, which means standards based browsers of any sort now will often not work correctly with an application developed for IE6.
Of course, the apps *should* have been coded to work with standards, but then they would never have worked with IE. So we are left supporting legacy applications that only work with IE6. As MS have actually attempted to support some standards in the later versions of IE, then so those later versions of IE do not always support pages writen for IE6 either. You can sometimes get away with setting compatibilty mode which was paradoxically introduced to make the standards compatible browser INcompatible with the standards in a similar way to earlier versions of IE in order to attempt to provide some backwards compatibilty - always overlooked by MS.
Now those same people are being told to re-write their applications to get away from that crummy old browser (remember - the one that was going to provide longevity and standards if only you would write your apps to work with it?) and write them some other way that will provide longevity and standards. We promise we won't say the same again to you in a few years, and drop your support, honest.
I agree with AC above:
"...Perhaps because I have better things to do with my money that buy new computers every three years because MS et al are determined to have people chace the latest "big shiny".
It is all about clever marketing, and the people who harp on about getting the latest browsers/OS are sadly being led by the nose by the marketing types, forgetting that IE6 on WIndows 2000 was once the latest browser/OS and that it would save us all.
It's like Groundhog day.