Is IE 6 a COBOL-like legacy situation?
October 1, 2009 · by Kevin Runde
Today I received an email from MSN telling me they now recommend using IE 8. I was shocked when I read that. IE 8 has been out since March 19, 2009 and MSN is finally recommending IE 8. It only took them about 6 months. That got a friend and I thinking about IE 6 and the many issues companies will have MS finally stops supporting IE 6. What do I mean? Many companies have internal “Web Applications” that work only with IE 6. I say “Web Applications” because they are not really a web application. Sure they use the browser, but most were written in ASP and rely on specific IE 6 “functionality” that does not work with other web browsers. A real web app is cross platform compatible in my opinion.
This is yet another perfect example of someone trying to take standards and add their own propriety extensions so you have to use their product rather than another standards compliant product (Vendor Lock In). The pragmatic in me hopes these companies will learn from their mistakes when they are finally forced to rewrite all of their IE 6 specific application, but the realist in my realizes they won’t. Worse yet Microsoft will cut support for IE 6 and all of their newer OSes will only support newer versions of IE so eventually companies will have to upgrade or move to a different OS. UnlikeCOBOL which IBM and others are perfectly willing to still sell you systems to run your legacy COBOL. So in my opinion IE 6 is not a COBOL-like Legacy situation. It is actually much worse.
-Kevin
Filed in: Team Member Blog Comments (0)
Comments
There are no comments for this entry.