Category Archives: Microsoft

Why Are We Still Using Internet Explorer 6? – Part Two

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Nearly a year and a half ago I wrote this post about why many large organizations are still using Internet Explorer 6. Every now and again, the post is re-discovered and is re-circulated and I get some great feedback about it. I’ve decided that it is time for a bit of an update on the subject, so here goes.

I’m going to assume that you’ve read my original post, but in one line, the reason many large organizations still use Internet Explorer 6 is application compatibility. My employer (a large government department) has recently experienced this first-hand, having had to postpone deployment of Internet Explorer 8 after discovering compatibility issues (mid-deployment) with some important business applications. I have no idea how come they only discovered the issues after starting to deploy. Either someone didn’t do due diligence and test before-hand, or worse, they were completely clueless about the risks of incompatibilities. Either way, as a fellow IT employee in the same organization, it’s down right embarrassing.

One of the most frequent comments I receive as feedback on my original post is that folks get the compatibility issues, but they believe that we wouldn’t be in this situation if these incompatible applications had been written using web standards. It’s the fault of the application developers that their applications only work properly with Internet Explorer 6.

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Tech Days Ottawa

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I attended Tech Days in Ottawa this past Thursday. I stuck with the “Web Developer” stream all day and I have to say, I was a little disappointed.

To be fair I think I had very high expectations. I’ve been watching a lot of the PDC session videos online, videos of presentations by Oren Eini (aka Ayende Rahien) and attending Karl Seguin recent excellent presentation at ODNC. Needless to say, the people who presented at a one day conference in Ottawa (of all places) were not all of the same calibre. On top of that, the presentations and slide decks used are not created by the presenters. These are just people re-presenting someone else’s presentation (and in some cases re-telling someone else’s jokes).

The conference’s swag bag, or rather box, was a cereal box of “Techie Crunch” with some relatively good stuff including:

  1. 6 month TechNet subscription (but I already have a 1 year subscription)
  2. Full version of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (already have this too)
  3. Full version of Expression Web 2 (no source control support,  not even for Visual SourceSafe. BOO!)
  4. Full TechEd DVD set (this is actually AWESOME)

The last one includes hundreds of presentations, including the presentations I attend, but presented by the original presenters, by engaging and entertaining people.

Ironically, the best presentation I attended all day was given by a man with a primarily Unix/Linux background who nearly completely skipped over the Microsoft specific topics in the slide desk he was presenting.