When it's not really my job. I don't understand it either, but if there's a company with tens of thousands of employees with a good % using IE6, and I'm working for a different company that has to write xyz for them, it's not my place to demand that the huge company upgrades all their browsers. It sucks for me but nothing I can do.

The browser's are free, and already tested. I assume you must mean that the company intranet would be broken by the upgrade? I guess that is a valid reason.....

Is that what is going on in your case Gullanian?

EDIT: It sounds like it's not, which is just ridiculous. Obviously it's not your fault, but the decision to just keep using ie6 because everyone already has it installed is absolutely insane. Why wouldn't managment just send people a ****ing link to the new version of chrome or whatever and tell them to take 60 seconds to download and install it.

Yeah idk either

I think part of it is that when IE6 was The Browser, people didn't have to worry about writing for more than one browser. Because of that, people were free to use non-standard IE-specific things to make the internal web-tool work. Since this is mostly internal tools, they have more control over what browser is used and it is easier just stay with what you have.

But this ends up being the band-aid problem. Do you want something that hurts a little bit for a while before it is done or do you want something that hurts a lot, but takes less time. A lot of companies are going to be forced to just tear the band-aid off quickly stops supporting it.

Any of you on stack overflow, if you could upvote our open source advert it would be appreciated

http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.co...h-2011/458#458

If you think "sending a link to the new browser" is an actual solution, you've never worked in a company with 100 non-technical employees, let alone one with 10,000.

Even if you have no software specifically written for IE6 - which is a big if, in many cases - you ultimately need to have an IT guy install the software on each machine (either because users don't know how, or don't have security permissions to install software). Even if it only takes 10 minutes (the IT guy goes to a desk, the person saves their work, IT guy installs the software, reboots, tests, person gets back in), that's a total of 20 working minutes lost per workstation. If you have 10,000 workstations, that's over 3,000 hours of work time lost for a browser upgrade. Add on to that additional support effort for users confused about the new browser and general annoyance that comes along with new software, and it becomes a major business decision to upgrade a browser.

And forget it if you have internal apps that require IE6. Those things don't get upgraded unless they're directly costing the company a LOT of of money, and even then they are a low priority. Weighed against all that, having your developers write websites and apps that are IE6 compatible isn't all that big a deal.

That's why Chrome is so great imo, constant behind the scene updates. Jeff Attawood @ Coding horror had a good article on it:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/201...e-version.html

Companies using this should save a lot of money if upgrading is an expensive decision

I just don't buy this at all. It's 2011. Hundreds of millions of stupid people download and install browsers. Presumably these workers have desk jobs where they use a computer daily. They cannot download a file and double click it? That is absurd.

And even if some of them really are that dumb, what percent of the workers is it? Let the 5-10% of droolers email IT for help if they need to, everyone else can do the install.

That might cause problems in some setups where average users don't have install permissions - like basically every big Corporation.

Really? My mother in law is on a computer all the time. She has no idea how to upgrade her browser. She's not dumb, but it has no relevance in her life.

I was a programmer in a big company for 5 years. For 4 of those years, I couldn't install any software on my computer. This is standard in large companies.

Still not buying the "people can't do it" argument. It's just too easy. I'm confident the large majority of people can do it, especially with instructions.

This is a different issue, and I could see valid reasons for this. But if there is a setup like this, I'm sure there are ways to allow selective installs.

If you really have 10,000 users on 10,000 computers you should be able to say "when you come in on Monday you will have IE9 installed". Then you have some kind of script that you push to all the computers and it runs in an hour.

It probably does have to be IE9 because let's face it, big companies aren't going to go and install Chrome or Firefox or whatever else. Did you know absolutely anyone can go and read the source code? That's inconsistent with our security policy.

It'd be nice to be young and have not worked in 100k plus people IT companies and think everything was easy. I'm in a 150 people start up now and don't have admin permission to an XP image running on a VM...

young? i wish...

It's not youth, Just a different environment.

And I think it's just as amusing when people who have only worked in large corporate environments locked down on MS Windows, go and assume that only those environments can get real work done.

Sometimes we can be products of our environments more than we'd like, if we don't make efforts to understand what's out there, what is done, and what is possible.

Considering the attitude demonstrated thus far, corporations will be stuck with ie6 until 2050? ie10 has already been announced, so when is the corporate sluggishness decide to upgrade?

The security one is sort of funny. I read some CISSP book that covers what the CISSP person ought to know for the exam. Not sure why anyone would need this book (or cert) considering you would already have to have 5 years experience on the job to even be considered.

I was rather shocked at the derisive attitude demonstrated towards programmers in the book. The author went out of her way to call programmers all sorts of silly names. If the book teaches nothing beyond common sense, it does show the attitude in the corporate world towards its employees.

Programming in a nutshell according to this book: Program in Java, use Applets, and if the programmer messes up, program it yourself (regardless to the fact you don't know what you are doing).

I just can't imagine working at a place like that.

"Code to IE6."
"No."
"You have to."
"The guy who fills my spot will have to. Consider this my two-week resignation."

I'm very happy that I work for a company that believes that I am an engineer and should be able to properly run a computer. The large cooperation that bought us was also nice enough to let us continue with this philosophy (they are very much a Windows only, no admin rights, you can't install an update until IT approves it company).

I kinda missed the boat on the IE6 discussion, but to those who are wondering why companies refuse to upgrade from IE6 is often because they rely on legacy software (timesheets, project management, ticketing) they will only on IE6. Yes, there is a lot of old software out there that is not forward compatible.

My point in the IE6 discussion wasn't to say it will never happen, it was to point out that it's not like upgrading your browser at home. There's a lot of time & money involved in making a change that, for a lot of companies, only really matters to programmers who think they're too good to write code that's compatible with old technology.

that's, like, not at all what's happening from the programmer side.

Which C++ editor and compiler would you guys recommend to me?

I am currently using cygwin's emacs and g++ (forgot the right name) compiler.

I like Visual Studio C++.