It stops me getting annoyed when I have to look at it from work (8-p) That is, of course, assuming it doesn't take hundreds of man-hours.

Then they shouldn't be surfing at work. (8+D

Mark

Perfectly valid sites that I use at work are poorly displayed and difficult to use without some jiggery-pokery in IE6.

Then bitch about it to your IT support. If it's actually for work but you're using a nine year old browser that's not supported properly that's not really the problem of the 'site designer, in my opinion. (8+D

Mark

Fairy nuff. My opinion differs. (8-p)

+1

I don't think you understand how large organisations work. My company has ~100,000 users and parts of the organisation are very tightly regulated (GxP). Any change to software needs to be tested, don't forget that IE is very tightly integrated into Windows, can you imagine the fuss if clinical trial data was incorrectly analysed due to upgrading IE? Once you've established that the critical systems are unaffected you then need to go through the 1000s of intranets and web apps.

I don't think I underestimate that either. (8+p

Mark

IT support will tell you that they provide a number of web resources that they cannot guarantee will work in any other browser.
As for the site designers, maybe it's not their job to support an old browser. But that might stop a company buying their services as they cannot properly view the site. We all know the government use IE 6, if they want to buy a service they will probably buy a lot of it, so it's the designer's (or more specifically the person who hired the designer) fault.

That said I despise web resources (you know, web based address books, web based application to deal with customer jobs etc), IMO, the browser shouldn't be used for such important things. If you require a resource to be shared, a separate reader should be required which can be updated when the resource is, that way you have your browser for browsing and your 'Customer Jobs' app for dealing customer jobs...

I'm sorry, but I think you're bonkers. A browser is the perfect interface to centralised resources.

In dealing with customer jobs I access more portals than I care to count, provided by the likes of BT. If they were not browser based, I'd have to have over 9000 applications installed across every machine anyone at work ever used. Imagine keeping them all up to date. It would be very annoying.

Of course, it would be even more perfecterer if all the portals ran properly in one compliant browser. I have some that won't run in IE8 and some that won't run in FF, but two browsers is still better than 9000 separate applications.

In reality, you wouldn't have 9000 different applications though, you'd work to have a single application that interfaced with many portals. The problem with using browsers is that while in one tab you are midway writing up a response to a customer, in another you are checking some details and in another is the application that alerts you to new jobs, in a fourth tab you search for something to do with the reply to the customer, you click on a link, the browser throws a fit and crashes. At best the browser will restore the tabs, but not the response that you were writing. Had you been using a separate applications the crash of your web browser would have been a minor annoyance, leaving you to reopen it and search for whatever it was you were searching for.
Or perhaps an application you regularly use and keep open and logged on to occasionally throws away your session and requires you to restart your browser to create a new one, you must close all of your other tabs which could contain information which you are using for another job (there could be 20 or 30 tabs open, all results from a search, some tabs you've thrown away, you'd have to spend another half an hour sifting through your history or back through the search engine to come up with these same sites), I guess you could force crash the browser, but that's never good practise, and there is no guarantee it will restore the tabs correctly. If the web app that keeps throwing you off were a separate application, you'd save yourself restoring all the tabs.

I've used web applications in my last three jobs, they are too fragile. And it can be a great pain when you buy in a new system that does everything you need at the right price, but works on a different version of a given browser. Do you roll out a new version and brake stuff in all of the existing web applications? Or do you stay where you are and ignore this tool you've spent money on?

Perhaps they can work, perhaps they have been designed to behave perfectly where you work. Just with the few dozen apps I've used over three different systems, they have all had downfalls where a standalone app wouldn't.

It just sounds like you're using a crap browser

I don't have a choice as I'm at work, but there are so many web based apps which need to be tested that the browser isn't going to be upgraded any time soon.

+1

The more we try to get things working in IE6, the more we are held back. MS are on IE8, and even THAT doesn’t fully work to standards, though it is much better.

Companies claiming that their infrastructure is frozen because a web browser could bork their systems clearly haven’t thought that whole OS dependency thing through properly. If you HAVE to have IE6 installed for whatever excuse you are sticking to, then you really, really should have a second more up to date available. Eventually, those sites you rely on WILL start to kick IE6 out the door (note that some are already doing that).

What happens when you replace a machine? Can you still specify Windows 95?

Firefox 2 and 3 in one place, IE 6 (for the above, read window instead of tab) and 7 in the other two...



I guess this is what happens if you don't keep everything up-to-date. It's unfortunate that IE was so ingrained into Windows, as I'm sure this has played havoc somewhere along the way.



I guess as long as you have a disk and a licence you can do it...