Don't be <i>that guy</i>. Or <i>that department</i>. If you're not willing to give your users addons, at least give them Chrome... The browser is much more secure than IE6, and you'd be doing your company's security profile a huge favor.
With the google chrome addon, would the IE6 still look identical to the original IE6? I don't like the look of the tabbed browsing in IE7&8, I'm still in that 10% of people who use IE6, and I'm in the 17% of IE6 users who feel no need to "upgrade".
As others have mentioned, seems like if you're going to go through the trouble of installing a plug in that makes IE like Chrome you might as well just use Chrome.
Also; I would love to see the Google and Anti-trust firestorm that would rain down on Microsoft if they tried the same stunt in reverse and designed a plugin that made huge alterations to another company's product.
But I guess that's one way for Google to get chrome out to more than the 4 people who are using it now.
It's ironic that sysadmins that are tasked with the security of their computers are causing the biggest problem by not getting off their lazy asses and upgrading software.
But you can be sure that these are the same people that keep McAfee updated, taking up 25% of your resources.
I can't speak for all sys admins Gargoyle, and I'm sure there are some out there that are just too lazy to upgrade software. From my experience, however, it's less them being too lazy to upgrade the software than the users not wanting to learn to use something new. Sure, the sysadmins should be saying too bad, learn to use it anyway, but that gets hard to do when the person you're talking to is an executive or someone else who could potentially fire you.
The biggest holdup for moving from IE6 is companies that access internal resources or web resources that aren't compatible outside of IE6. I know a lot of banks have internal sites that won't render beyond IE6 and they can't be buggered to recode their whole back-end.
Oh I do love the wonderful "admins should do this" blanket statements.
Let me give those who don't sit in the Enterprise world a little eye opener.
Take a company in this case called "company A" with 25,000 employees distributed globally. So lets then take that scenario a little deeper. They all have a baseline corporate build but with some regional variances. Local support teams in service management to aid the local users.
Now lets say company A have 25+ OSS/BSS applications and a good proportion of them have been built using IE5 or IE6. They would be most likely externally sourced as larger enterprises do that.
Company A acquires company B who had previously acquired companies C, D and E.
So between them they share around 50+ IT BSS/OSS applications. Some are external, some are internal. Consolidation of business (the fabled integration which never happens truly) means valuable skills/single points of knowledge depart with no replacement.
So to roll out IE7/IE8 or/and Chrome....
Migration of around 5-6 different corporate builds across a global space. Probably more as they are region specific (UK, EU, Asia, North America).
So then applications need updating that are in constant use (billing platforms, CRM platforms, expenses systems, resource management, sales systems.. the list is endless).
Easy huh? Take a couple of weeks there then It can take years to upgrade a single system. The amount of planning and risk analysis alone can take a year.
So where is this magic pool of IT resource to do this coming from?
EVERY Enterprise I know is squeezing staff levels. OpEx challenges of 10%, 20% and more are demanded by the CFO/FD. Do you guys read the news? IT isn't a great place to be right now in any business. There is no pot of money to spend anymore.
The above is just the TIP of an Iceberg. I could write a 200+ article on the challenges that even something as simple as "upgrading the browser" and it's associated impact across an enterprise.
So please, politely. Don't be an idiot to your admins, engineers and helpdesk. Don't make assumptions about how something is so easy.
Stop looking at tech and look at business.
Could you build a business case with proven ROI for millions of your corporate coins for a browser upgrade? One that actually stacks up. I doubt it.
...and in a rare show of "my intraweb pen0s is bigger than yours"....
The above "rant" is because I am an Enterprise Architect for a global enterprise so I know what I am talking about. It's my job to do so.
Now jobworths, flame away and I will e-kick you a little harder.
Lets also accept that there are plenty companies that still have win2k machines that can't run ie7 or ie8. True they could use firefox.
But then there are plenty of business apps that I run into daily that still don't work in Firefox. So being able to drop this as an add-in to ie6 is wicked awesome.
Sure, there's no easy fix for web apps that don't render beyond IE6. Shorty's right, fixing those apps would be a huge demand on resources.
However, there are a lot of companies that aren't multinational clusterfucks that could upgrade their systems with less of the challenges Shorty mentioned. I worked for a company with 10k employees, but in one place, and it had a hierarchical structure where each group was doing very different work. While that's a large company, it was easier for each group's sysadmin to fix their own group without worrying about all 10,000 employees. Complexity was way less compared to what Shorty described.
I mention that because that company is set up just like most universities. It boggles my mind that computer labs managed on the college or department level can't keep browsers updated when there is no application dependency on antiqueware.
The above is just the TIP of an Iceberg. I could write a 200+ article on the challenges that even something as simple as "upgrading the browser" and it's associated impact across an enterprise.
I don't think it's correct to refer to this as a problem of people "wanting to run" IE6. Corporate IT departments need and want to run, not the browser itself, but its Trident rendering engine, MSHTML.DLL, for their business
software to display HTML. Their primary objective isn't to run iexplore.exe to display what we recognize as the IE6 browser. They then run the IE6 browser for the secondary reason, that iexplore.exe is already there.
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Yes, I'm THAT guy.
http://internet-explorer-help.blogspot.com/2008/03/disable-tabbed-browsing-in-internet.html
Also; I would love to see the Google and Anti-trust firestorm that would rain down on Microsoft if they tried the same stunt in reverse and designed a plugin that made huge alterations to another company's product.
But I guess that's one way for Google to get chrome out to more than the 4 people who are using it now.
But you can be sure that these are the same people that keep McAfee updated, taking up 25% of your resources.
Let me give those who don't sit in the Enterprise world a little eye opener.
Take a company in this case called "company A" with 25,000 employees distributed globally. So lets then take that scenario a little deeper. They all have a baseline corporate build but with some regional variances. Local support teams in service management to aid the local users.
Now lets say company A have 25+ OSS/BSS applications and a good proportion of them have been built using IE5 or IE6. They would be most likely externally sourced as larger enterprises do that.
Company A acquires company B who had previously acquired companies C, D and E.
So between them they share around 50+ IT BSS/OSS applications. Some are external, some are internal. Consolidation of business (the fabled integration which never happens truly) means valuable skills/single points of knowledge depart with no replacement.
So to roll out IE7/IE8 or/and Chrome....
Migration of around 5-6 different corporate builds across a global space. Probably more as they are region specific (UK, EU, Asia, North America).
So then applications need updating that are in constant use (billing platforms, CRM platforms, expenses systems, resource management, sales systems.. the list is endless).
Easy huh? Take a couple of weeks there then
So where is this magic pool of IT resource to do this coming from?
EVERY Enterprise I know is squeezing staff levels. OpEx challenges of 10%, 20% and more are demanded by the CFO/FD. Do you guys read the news? IT isn't a great place to be right now in any business. There is no pot of money to spend anymore.
The above is just the TIP of an Iceberg. I could write a 200+ article on the challenges that even something as simple as "upgrading the browser" and it's associated impact across an enterprise.
So please, politely. Don't be an idiot to your admins, engineers and helpdesk. Don't make assumptions about how something is so easy.
Stop looking at tech and look at business.
Could you build a business case with proven ROI for millions of your corporate coins for a browser upgrade? One that actually stacks up. I doubt it.
...and in a rare show of "my intraweb pen0s is bigger than yours"....
The above "rant" is because I am an Enterprise Architect for a global enterprise so I know what I am talking about. It's my job to do so.
Now jobworths, flame away and I will e-kick you a little harder.
But then there are plenty of business apps that I run into daily that still don't work in Firefox. So being able to drop this as an add-in to ie6 is wicked awesome.
However, there are a lot of companies that aren't multinational clusterfucks that could upgrade their systems with less of the challenges Shorty mentioned. I worked for a company with 10k employees, but in one place, and it had a hierarchical structure where each group was doing very different work. While that's a large company, it was easier for each group's sysadmin to fix their own group without worrying about all 10,000 employees. Complexity was way less compared to what Shorty described.
I mention that because that company is set up just like most universities. It boggles my mind that computer labs managed on the college or department level can't keep browsers updated when there is no application dependency on antiqueware.
Sounds like a plan to me!
software to display HTML. Their primary objective isn't to run iexplore.exe to display what we recognize as the IE6 browser. They then run the IE6 browser for the secondary reason, that iexplore.exe is already there.