IE6 and Corporate IT Stupidity

Today there was a riff on the Digg blog about whether or not Digg.com should stop supporting IE6.

Here at Digg, like most sites, the designers, developers, and QA engineers spend a lot of time making sure the site works in IE6, an eight-year-old browser superseded by two full releases. It consumes time that could be spent building the future of Digg. Here’s what we’re gonna do — and not do — about it.

One thing that resonated with me is that the main reason people are still using IE6 is because corporate policy forces them to. My last four projects have all involved large companies where IE6 was mandatory. Mandatory, meaning: when I chose to download and install Firefox, circumventing various filters in order to do so, I was formally reprimanded.

Never mind the fact that Firefox is orders of magnitude more secure than IE6, and never mind the fact that I'm a professional web developer who can presumably be trusted to drive a browser around the Internet without wrapping it around a telephone pole, picking up exotic viruses, or otherwise exposing the company to risk.

This is the stupidity and condescension of corporate IT.

And while I understand that a large rollout of a new browser to 40,000 users and 217 internal line of business apps can be a costly, time-consuming proposition, suckling from the malnourishing tit of Internet Explorer is at least as costly in the long run.