How To Distract Clients From Using IE6

Question

How can we distract our clients from using IE6. We know IE6 is not a good standard-compliant browsers; has many issues. How to satisfy clients so that they do not use IE6?

Answer 1

One of the reasons this problem exists is as follows.

Many IE6 user have no choice. They sit behind corporate firewalls with locked down machines and while on their home machines they will have the latest technology they are constrained by the workplace rules and policies.

So why do the corporates not upgrade from IE6 to 7 or 8? Well here is one reason. Workload.

As a sysop you need to upgrade 500 machines to the new browser.

In many cases these browsers run mission critical add-ins as ActiveX's etc so to do the upgrade you have to do all the testing and verification and then do a planned roll out upgrade, which will have problems, hiccups and glitches, a lot of work and late nights and unpaid overtime and a lot of flak from the users as you do this.

And what is the payback for this upgrade? Well the internal systems work on IE8 exactly as they worked on IE6, (well not always and you may need to rewrite that as well) but the users can now access the latest startup site that plugs into Facebook (but will be gone in 6 months) perfectly but it is not work related.

So unless there is a tangible business benefit many shops simply cannot se a reason, or justify the cost of a browser upgrade.

These locations will convert, when they go to Windows 7 perhaps or because the "application" they use internally is upgraded and needs the newer browser version. But at this point there is a justification for doing it.

N.B. I have recently worked in two jobs where IE6 compatibility was a must for this reason, large client bases, behind firewalls with lockdown, and i am not stating the above as a reason/excuse not to do it. The sooner the better.