I totally agree that large organisations are often behind the curve with IT deployments. I think this will always be the case with the operating system (due to a combination of risk-aversity and rollout cost).

Interestingly though, I think that the browser issue may start to change as more and more “proper” applications move to a web model. I think that some of the more forward-looking organisations are starting to realise that a browser is not just for reading news sites or the corporate intranet, but a true low-cost application deployment environment. Hopefully this, and the fact that a browser rollout is intrinsically simpler and lower-cost than a whole OS, means that maybe things are about to change?

Paul Caplin, our CEO, has posted an interesting commentary on this exact issue over at Finextra: http://www.finextra.com/community/fullblog.aspx?id=3069

Patrick

It’s absolutely true that supporting IE6 is frustrating. The problem in our space is that it’s absolutely essential to do so, at the current time. If we dropped IE6 support right now our offering would no longer be as compelling for the banks…

Even when (not if) we drop support for IE6 because our user-base is no longer using it in sufficient numbers, there will still be a requirement to support IE7. And in fact, the performance problem still remains in that browser too. Our experience is that so long as the user with IE6 has either the 5.7 script engine or the GC frequency patch for the 5.6 engine (which in fact we mandate), then the performance of the app is comparable in IE6 and IE7. This means that a focus on performance will still exist, even when IE6 gets finally slain!

However, IE7 has the huge benefit of not being totally broken with respect to layout, CSS and respect for even the loosest of web standards. This is where a large part of the engineering cost for IE6 support lies. And I think this is where both of your comments are focussing. Right now we have to have separate IE6 stylesheets, and a large amount of time is spent getting layout to work the same in IE6 vs. the rest of the world. For IE7 and above we specify standards mode in our HTML, which actually makes the issue pretty much go away.

@Cymex: I’m pretty confident that the IE8 migration will happen. And in a roundabout way, I hope that a combination of public sites like Digg and Youtube dropping IE6 support and apps like ours encouraging a more modern browser will cause a critical mass of user lobbying that means this time next year we’ll all be complaining about IE7!

Patrick

There is a problem here for enterprise IT, as the pace of software development continues to get ever quicker, the release cycle getting ever shorter and shorter, how long will command and control from the ivory tower really work? Large organisations are getting more and more uncompetitive by the day.

Your effort for producing high performance code is creditable but performance consideration does not hit the bull’s-eye.

“I have heard that a couple of large international investment banks are planning to mass roll-out IE8 by the end of the year.”

That’s good news. I hope you got the information from a trustworthy source.

Thanks for your thoughts.
Cy

However, I would argue that the extra cost and man hours spent tailoring the solution to IE6 is not worth the speed increases. For well under the cost of tailoring the solution to IE6 you could put aside man hours for someone to check the performance of the applications in the latest browsers (all which come with or have available, performance testing suites) and remove any bottlenecks. Thus obtaining the same benefits at much less cost to the company, and dare I say it…frustration .