UK: Too Complicated to Upgrade from IE6
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Death Cog Machine
The Government said it would be too difficult and expensive to upgrade its software and departments from Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 to a more sophisticated and secure web browser.
The admission came after more than 6,000 people signed up to a online petition on a government website urging the Prime Minister to encourage government departments to upgrade from IE6.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/7928193/Upgrading-from-IE6-is-too-complicated-says-Government.html
Wow...even the UK government is still on IE6. Incompetent fucks.
The Government was keen to stress that Internet Explorer 6 was sufficiently secure for its needs, and that there was no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully-patched version of Internet Explorer to another browser would be more secure.
There's no evidence that upgrading from IE6 would be more secure? Really?
Now they're just making shit up.
Comments
I always wonder why they don't do shit like that.
Are you fucking kidding me? It's a free upgrade and it's painless. It's not rocket science, you're not installing a fucking network firewall configuration, there isn't much you can do to configure a browser on a network to be "safe" anyways. Goddamn it I hate lazy fucking Network Administrators.
There's probably some legal bullshit that they would have to pay to use the software given that they're a state agency or something, or that legally they have to pay certain people to install the software or some bullshit like that.
Rather than start from scratch, why not save a few quid by writing an application that runs in allready existing software? Its not a bad idea, plenty of places do it. However, most private business at the time would have specified that it ran in IE and any updated / new versions of IE and that it ran in FF - then and now the second most popular browser. If it had been written now, they would specify IE, FF, Chrome, Safari and Opera.
However, the contract negiotiator and the legal brains employed at the time had no idea about how things work or how they are developed.
Hence, the UK government has a number of applications that will only run on IE 6.
Its not just IE. Might be a good idea to get open office rather than pay for MS office? No, far to many government run application integrate with MS office and will not integrate with anything else without a massive rework.
On top of that, they believe 'training cost' for using openoffice would be to much. It really makes me mad. If it was a private business, they would say 'fuck training on the new product, learn to use it, its hardly different'.
Not the majority that work in the public sector (IE for the government) - thats why they work for the government, because they fail.
Nah, most if not all are on XP. TBH, transdering to vista at any point up until recently would have been pointless. Have heard talk of some upgrades to windows 7, but, XP does what it is needed for an for the most part, governemnt departments have deals with wondows to support XP for a good few years yet.
I can imagine a lot of government network managers thinking 'nah, we got it working how we want now, no need to upgrade'.
The good old "why fixit if it ain't broke" approach.....Yep I could imagine that coming from their finance minister.