Have an IE6 only application?
17 May
IE6 needs to die and I’ve decided to do something about it. The trouble is, I need applications to test and most legacy apps will be only on a company’s intranet. And since I’ve already applied this method to my company’s apps, I need volunteers.
If you have an IE6 application that I can test with, then please drop me a line at mike@migrateie6.com. Please give me a short description of it (ActiveX, broken Javascript or browser detection, etc) and how I’d test (VPN or public URL).
I offer in return the easiest route to migrating your company to IE8 and later Windows versions.
**Update**
Ouch. I had to clone and move the Leemba demo off my main slice. It was pretty starved for memory and my load average went over 10. It took me 20 minutes or so to clone and reconfigure everything–slicehost rocks!
And yet, I’ve only gotten one email so far. The places I’ve posted so far cater to developers and startups, who probably aren’t locked into IE6. So if you know somebody, please send them my way. Moving off IE6 will be good for everybody. :-)
Don’t take this the wrong way, but any IT administrator in charge of curating an IE6 only app is keeping it that way only for their own job security.
There may be a few cases of that, I think. But in most cases I believe it’s just an enormous problem that the business doesn’t want to spend money on.
Don’t be so sure about that. There are plenty of consulting companies that wrote apps a few years ago that are probably still being used today. Getting them updated usually involves making a call to the same company and then paying to have them updated. So it’s cheaper to keep running IE6.
There are two computers where I’m at where, thankfully, a new application is forcing the upgrade to Windows XP (yeah, XP). These computers do maybe two tasks and that’s all they do, so management doesn’t like to get “modern” systems for them.
I got ya. That was the very problem I had when I set out, an app written by consultants (recently!) that required IE6. I was able to upgrade to IE8 and still run the app, without any changes to their code.
I’m not worried either about single-purpose machines. But there’s a big slice of the internet stats that are still using IE6. It seems to me that whole companies are putting off upgrading for the sake of a few apps.
If there’s a technical reason they’re not upgrading, then I can help. Hopefully the rest are dedicated for specific purposes and are never allowed on the internet. :-)