Comments on: IE6 still popular in Federal Government

By: Randy Andy Pandy Bolt

Randy Andy Pandy Bolt — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:10:38 +0000

“However, in a wide-ranging survey conducted recently, the eGov AU blog operated by Craig Thomler, the Australian managing director of Delib, which provides digital democracy solutions, seven distinct Federal Government departments and agencies revealed they were still mandating and/or supporting Internet Explorer 6.”

I’d like to see people getting kicked for just plain dumb-fuckness, a) partly for supporting anything microsoft windblows, and b) using buggy crapware that came out of Affrika with the neanderthals..

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 03:20:46 +0000

Governments (state/federal) outsourced IT functions a long time ago, these companies sold the government (managers who have no IT background) on custom developed applications instead of “off the shelf” products, not to mention what they developed tended to be sloppy at best. Managers were happy as they were invited to nice lunches, fancy Christmas events and generally moved on before anyone worked out what happened.

When you have multiple custom core applications that require upgrading to be compatible with new browsers or even operating systems it tends to cost a crap load of money. This usually ends up in a nasty cycle where the software is always out of date or in an unsupported state, meanwhile the outsourcing company no longer has any SLA’s applied as they are unable to support that has no product support, of course they still get paid and in most cases paid even more due to the risk of something going wrong.

But don’t worry everyone, SaaS is here to save the day! it’s just a shame we can’t hold the people responsible (financially) for the stupid decisions they make.

By: Mathew

Mathew — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:22:44 +0000

The problem is that Microsoft conned people into using ActiveX and then dropped support. Too many developers foolishly wrote applications in ActiveX and the cost of upgrading is too high. Unfortunately some have repeated the mistake with Silverlight, but hopefully CIOs have learnt from this and choose standards based solutions.

By: Gwyntaglaw

Gwyntaglaw — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:46:35 +0000

Tom, I’m guessing that’s it actually – crappy old web apps that won’t survive the upgrade.

By: Gwyntaglaw

Gwyntaglaw — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:45:21 +0000

In the NSW Government where I worked until recently, there were quite a few web-based custom apps that were developed 10 years ago. Some of these break in IE7 and above, so they just have to keep clinging to good ol’ IE6.

Why don’t they update the custom apps, you may ask? Because their IT development budget has been slashed to basically nil. And some agencies I know have blown millions on some big IT projects that never reached production. So definitely no new money there.

Before the last state election, it got so bad with IE6 that we couldn’t even view the Liberal Party website to review their policy announcements – the site just point-blank refused to display, giving a message to upgrade! Needless to say, we all had to get our jobs done regardless, and so installed Chrome (against strict IT policies).

By: Pcopeland

Pcopeland — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 03:45:47 +0000

This is pretty scary! You would think that from a security perspective alone it would be mandatory to keep reasonably up to date.

We recently participated in a federal government tender that had IE6 support as a requirement. Several vendors questioned that and sensibly it was removed.

Its worth noting – these days the performance of Javascript is very important in many of the more modern user interfaces. Its worth understanding the relative performance of Javascript across all of these browser and versions when deciding which browser to standardize on. http://celtickane.com/2010/02/jsbenchmark-february-2010-update/ – this is a 2 year old benchmark – which shows the relative performance of some of the older browsers. As you can see – there is a very big difference.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 02:50:43 +0000

Department of Immigration and Citizenship: “It’s a secwet”. Which translates to “Given our track record over the last decade, we prefer not to speak to anyone about anything unless we absolutely have to”.

By: Martin Eddy

Martin Eddy — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 23:03:15 +0000

I’m not defending them using IE6. I’m aware that all versions of IE obey GP.

I wasn’t aware that Chrome supports GP. Thanks for the tip.

But overall, the reason that Government IT departments stick with IE is because it’s just easier.

By: tom

tom — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:06:12 +0000

That doesn’t stop them upgrading to a newer IE version. Unless their web apps are so horrible to be usable only in IE6.

By: tom

tom — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:04:05 +0000

The activation for Windows on those VHD images has already expired so they are no longer usable. I’ve only tested the XP image, but I imagine the others would be similar.

By: Andrew van der Stock

Andrew van der Stock — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 12:03:44 +0000

IE 7, 8, 9 and 10 all obey IE group policy.
Google Chrome on Windows supports and enforces AD group policy, and has policy options available for Mac and Linux. Search for the details, you’ll find it.

By: Martin Eddy

Martin Eddy — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:37:54 +0000

Dammit. I hadn’t finished.

Someone was working on GP for Firefox but then Mozilla decided they needed to release a new version every other month or so, so the developer gave up on it. Can’t say I blame him.

By: Martin Eddy

Martin Eddy — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:35:03 +0000

I’ll tell you why they don’t want to push for people to use alternate browsers. A little thing called Group Policy(You may have heard of it ;P ) and the fact that out of the box you can lock down IE with it.

By: seven_tech

seven_tech — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 09:48:43 +0000

The agencies which noted they were still supporting IE6, according to the survey results, were….the Department of Health and Ageing….

ROFL! Why doesn’t this surprise me…..and people wonder why e-Health is struggling for organisation….

By: Dean

Dean — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:13:38 +0000

That says it all, really…

By: Ben Zemm

Ben Zemm — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 07:51:43 +0000

It may have been worth it to download the web developer VHD from the Microsoft website and run IE6 in a virtual machine and render that page: I remember it being obviously incorrect, mostly due to the use of alpha-channel PNGs.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 06:33:11 +0000

I know but I don’t have a stock photo of IE6 ;)

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 06:09:33 +0000

The picture is from a much newer version of Internet Explorer ;-)