When will businesses use IE7?


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I guess it's been about a year since IE7 has been out, IE6 has so many problems navigating most web-pages these days, not to mention the security issues that were fixed with IE7. I work for the US government and we still use IE6. I've heard from other people who work for private companies, and the majority use IE6 as well. Why? Why not upgrade to IE7? Is it a money or time issue?

I'd be interested to hear from the people who do this for a living, or just people who know: when will IE7 replace IE6 in businesses, and why the transition takes so long?

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That's a excellent question, I think they don't have time to upgrade or they don't care about it. My portfolio site require ie7, firefox or better to see it correctly

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Unfortunately, it won't be for a long time yet.

Companies only upgrade when they absolutely have to (yes, for most, that includes windows updates). Upgrading, no matter how minor, always has a very small chance of downtime, which companies just do not want/can't afford.

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We are still testing IE7 on our over 2,000+ applications that use a web browser. It will still be quite some time before we roll out IE7 to 60,000+ users. :p (Note: That doesn't stop someone like me, in IT, from downloading it, haha)

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A lot of companies out there have said "If you upgrade to IE7 and our apps don't work, then we won't support you." When you are dealing with a lot of different webapps, something like that is all the reason not to upgrade. I think it's absolutely insane that 3rd party vendors are doing this instead of testing and upgrading their code, but I guess that's the way the industry is heading.

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The division of the company I work for has over 3000+ employees and we're still on MSIE 6.0 (with SP2). A few months ago we also had a custom build of Firefox preinstalled.

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I'd be interested to hear from the people who do this for a living, or just people who know: when will IE7 replace IE6 in businesses, and why the transition takes so long?

A lot of an I.T. departments have to answer to higher management pressures to ensure that the applications provided to the user work perfectly with a given configuration: it is almost as if the I.T.

departments has to sign in blood the certification. Certifications take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. Sometimes, it's bordeing lazyness from I.T. departments: "It's forbidden to upgrade to XYZ because the corporate policy says so' is a final argument I have heard several times.

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And when you start talking about major government organizations making the transition, you're talking about testing compatibility with literally hundreds of sometimes unique applications and byzantine security layers.

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If you were a company IT guru guy who manages the hundreds and thousands of computers on the business network, and you got asked this question by an employee, what would you think?

"Hey, why don't we use IE7? It's been out for ages, and it's so much better than IE6! Come on!"

Well, is it? In a company, reliability is paramount, and change can disrupt or even destroy reliability - whether through lack of testing, unforeseen incompatibility errors, etc.. Upgrades to a company network requires work to upgrade the main image for each computer, tests to ensure the upgrade and the image work, and then an upgrade to every computer. Why would you spend all that time and effort ensuring the new version works when it not only may not work smoothly itself for everything you need, but also the upgrade for each PC may not?

Furthermore, what benefits do you get from moving from IE6 to IE7? Better support for HTML and CSS standards? It can display PNG images correctly? If you're not a web-based company, chances are you don't give a damn.

No, in all likelihood, the main reason companies won't upgrade from IE6 to IE7 is that the costs greatly outweigh the benefits, and in business, cost is everything.

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The biggest reason right now is 3rd party vendors saying "DO NOT UPGRADE" because they can't get their products to work correctly in the new systems.

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IE 7 was under testing for about 10 months with all our 3rd party venders before I pushed it down to everyone via WSUS last week. With any software package test before upgrading. Also to note I did create some documentation on the IU changes etc with IE7 and enabled the menu bar(file edit etc) by default using gpolicy or vbscript(can't remember), don't be the guy that just pushes crap down and expects users to know what they are doing. It will flood your help desk because we all know what is most important to the user email and viewing websites.

but really there is no real reason to rush the upgrade till the product is out of its life cycle.

This is fun, wonder what happens with an html email in outlook that has IE6 install on the computer?

http://immike.net/blog/2007/08/06/single-l...l-crashes-ie-6/

Edited by Xsabin
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Furthermore, what benefits do you get from moving from IE6 to IE7? Better support for HTML and CSS standards? It can display PNG images correctly? If you're not a web-based company, chances are you don't give a damn.

I haven't switched or even cared to switch the businesses I work with over to IE7 because of the reason you give above. They don't give a damn. It doesn't really matter as you say. In our testing of IE7 I didn't see enough claim to see that it was better for the accountant's computer to move them over to it - I'd have to spend 1/2 day explaining to every fricking body where the stop button is... just not worth that trouble. Plus, I have everyone use Opera, which everyone throughly enjoys.

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