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Comment by litewulf | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, 25% of the users of my site use IE of some kind, and about half that is IE6. These are people who will either ignore me if I ask them to get a new browser or will never come back.

Look guys, there are reasons that people don't upgrade, some good some bad. The other day a friend's 386 died, and with it all these Lotus 123 documents, now, do I berate them for using obsolete software or attempt to get them back on their feet?

(And yes, it is annoying to support IE6 and I have burned development time doing so. Mostly its "kind of okay" though, since I haven't run into anything too serious.)

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I was asked to provide a little support to a neighbour the other day - nothing serious but I did notice the Windows 98 machine was running some pretty old software. The owner made his case that the machine did everything he needed just how he liked it so he was going to keep his machine locked down and unchanged. Hard to argue against that as it is exactly the sort of line a great many corporates take - get it working then leave it alone.

Why bring this "Luddite" up? Well he is an active participant in a number of web communities plus does a fair bit of web shopping - he is certainly not the sort of user I would want to exclude from my sites. He will "upgrade" one day when his current PC dies but that could be a while yet.

Not so hard to argue: Because it is antisocial.

In the case of your neighbour with that careless attitude, there is a good chance his computer is part of a botnet or at least infected with some virus. Therefore a source of spam and even denial of service attacks.

I'm sure a lot of people felt the same a hundred years ago with old schoolers refusing to keep their horses away and just leaving manure all over the place. I'm sure car owners hated them the most. (Just to add a colourful simil.)

Well, often times, browser choice is out of your control.

Anyway, my view is that this kind of attacks the problem from the wrong end. (Ideally people would have up to date software because it just happened for them.) I think telling people their software is deficient just hurts the cause because it makes them angry at the web and not the browser.

(PS: I've worked at places standardized on Ubuntu Dapper. Its so old that getting Firefox 2 was a hack, and forget about Firefox 3... so the other end is similar, though perhaps not as deleterious to webmasters.)

That doesn't sound right. Windows 98 had no webservices running by default, so I would say it's actually a rather safe choice.

Drive-by Installs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-by_download

This is the wild frontier in computer security right now.

But how many of those will still run on 98? ;-)

They aim to old vulnerable versions in particular because the chances to infect are just higher. There are millions of unpatched Windows 98 online, specially in developing countries.

Maybe you are right - I don't have any numbers on that.

Anyway, most people I know which still run Windows 98 don't do it because they like the system, but because newer Windows versions don't run on their hardware.

I have a similar story, but with a different outcome.. My mother was running windows 95 on a old PC, and she had some trouble. I looked at it, decided I needed to re-install, and told her that I wanted to put Ubuntu on it. There was a bit of worry if she'd be able to figure it out, and I told her yes, and also strongly suggested that when she asks for my help, she should be willing to accept my recommendations.

Voila, Ubuntu installed and a brief, "wow, I'm actually running linux now?", and she was happy. Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice FTW.

Corporations with archaic IT operations procedures will be difficult, but the Windows 98-neighbours and mothers of the world need to start using Ubuntu.

Completely agree. My mother is happy with Ubuntu too.

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