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Comment by jschuur | Hacker News Reader

'If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It': said by IT departments everywhere responsible for the prevalence of old browsers versions in enterprise businesses.

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We had a young'un who just graduated college who we hired and recently raised a ruckus about someone using IE8 in the field. I shook my head and silently thanked the powers that be here that we got rid of our WinXP userbase before he got here. Otherwise that poor fella would have had a heart attack. Laddie, you ain't got it bad until you've had to work with IE6.

The thing is, when IE6 was new, it was far and away the best browser of the bunch.

In defense of those IT departments. It usually comes down to some ancient ERM software that only works in one version of IE with one version of Java (or ActiveX). Management has decided it is cheaper to use a pwned version of IE than pay a contractor to update the software.

I used to work in a place that use SAP-like software called MFP Pro that was implemented in IE6 days. Six-figure pricetag. We developed all our business processes around it, and they screwed us on support (which can be summed up by "Here's a URL to the link with the patches, we won't even email you when there's an update"). So we weren't going to give them more business when they came up with a better version... but we didn't have enough money to move to something else (once you factor in training costs etc). I left in 2009, and it was still running on an NT4 machine.

We did look at some cheaper options, but it's interesting that the manufacture of electronic systems doesn't really have anything cheap in the space. Properly managing nested BOMs of an arbitrary depth? Pretty much always a high pricetag or something you have to hack yourself...

They could still be right, though. Keep IE6 for that piece-of-shit enterprise web apps and still install Chrome or Firefox for the rest of your work.

IE6 just becomes the shell to the webapp instead of a browser in its own right. MS probably even has a way to install multiple versions of IE concurrently so you could run IE6 + "modern IE".

Used to be easier to do (ready-made script) in Linux than on Windows. (That is if wine was working.)

On Windows I think the official way is runnng it in a vm.

Yes, I don't know if MS makes it or another vendor, but you can get IE version whatever with an embedded IE 6. I've been at two companies now where this solution has been proposed.

Actually, this is something I've been curious about for awhile: I know "modern IE" comes with developer tools that allow you to switch IE versions, and essentially look at the site at hand as if you were using IE8 or IE7, all the way down to IE6. From my understanding, a website can manually trigger this switch by using a special <meta> tag. Can't these legacy systems that only work in IE6 simply use the appropriate <meta> tag and have things work? What are the differences between using straight up IE6 and the IE6 rendering engine in IE8?

Ha! It's a nice thought, but the various compatibility modes are not actually identical to the real versions of the browsers. Close, yes, but there are bugs/features that only show up in the real versions.

Ah, well that sucks. :P

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