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Despite lacking the ability to fully view the modern web IE6, released nine years ago, is still used by a number of Australian organisations, including some government agencies.
The Sydney Morning Herald, in the article Microsoft begs users to ditch IE6 quotes Microsoft Australia's chief security officer, Stuart Strathdee as saying “IE6 has a lifecycle. We’re well beyond its expiry date”.
The article also stated that,
Strathdee said corporate users who haven’t yet upgraded to IE8 fearing the loss of customised ERP and CRM systems were probably running outdated versions of those and should look to upgrade them all. He said the company would be happy to help customers do so.
“It’s only a very small number of queries on those systems that would be locked to IE6,” he said.
“For us security and privacy are closely related. We’re really pleading with people to upgrade.”
Is your agency still using IE6?
If so the question becomes, are your senior management aware of the security and reputation risks they are taking by doing so?
The bigger question is: do we keep tweaking our websites to support IE6 browsers?
ReplyDeleteThe proportion of IE6 users is higher than the proportion of people with Macs. Would we be happy to shut out all Mac users?
Hi Kerry,
ReplyDeleteI think if government abandoned IE6 we'd see a significant drop in usage.
In fact I've already witnessed how an agency, when it upgraded from IE6, saw its proportion of website users using IE6 fall from 20% to under 5%.
Cheers,
Craig
The use of IE6 at the large Commonwealth welfare agency I work for is already affecting internal productivity.
ReplyDeleteI often need to search the web for solutions and information. But many websites don't support IE6, so they fail to render properly and are very hard to read.
If IE6 is nine years old, I'd expect an upgrade in the next year following our 'ten years behind' principle!