Below, just some of the reaction to the UK government’s response to a petition submitted to Downing Street in February that opposed UK Gov’s continued endorsement of Microsoft’s IE 6. It shows a complete and absolute misunderstanding of the issue. As the author here says, “…you could quite easily use IE6 for IE6 only sites, and receive the protection of a more modern browser such as IE8, FF and Chrome for everything else”.
Apart from which, it’s not just an issue of cost of replacing IE6, it’s the cost across the whole of the public sector of maintaining websites that must support the IE6 browser. I know we’ve spent at least 25% of the development cost for the local government CoP platform on making every change backward compatible to IE6.
And not forgetting, it’s not just a security issue, it’s a usability and a productivity problem – users can’t access facilities on some sites (e.g. YouTube), and lack of support for plug-ins means you can’t use some of the neat integration facilities that support sharing and collaboration on many social media/social networking websites.
But then again, user productivity doesn’t appear to feature in this decision. Something the government may yet come to regret once someone calculates the true cost of sticking with IE6!
See previous blog on this topic.
UK.gov sticks to IE 6 cos it’s more ‘cost effective’, innit
Computers in Whitehall will largely continue to run Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, which will make web coders spit out their cheese‘n’pickle sarnies this lunchtime.
“It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE 8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users.”
“To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users,” it said.
The petition itself was sent to Number 10 earlier this year asking then Prime Minister Gordon Brown to follow German and French governments’ decisions to ditch IE 6.
“Apparently the IT team in Whitehall has yet to realise you could quite easily use IE6 for IE6 only sites, and receive the protection of a more modern browser such as IE8, FF and Chrome for everything else,” Reg reader Mark told us.
“As a senior web application developer, the mention of the positive word ’standards’ in a document about IE6 makes me die a little on the inside — ‘Public sector organisations are free to identify software that supports their business needs as long as it adheres to appropriate standards’ — I’m not sure which standards they mean… but certainly not the HTML ones.”
Alas, Internet Explorer 6 is here to stay to keep the wheels of central government turning in this big fat society of ours, people.
Read more at www.theregister.co.uk
See this at Amplify
It’s insecure, it’s flaky… it’s government IT policy!
I picked up on this article in The Register a couple of days ago, where Tom Watson MP had asked UK government departments when they intended to upgrade their browsers from Internet Explorer (IE6). It didn’t really surprise me that Tom Watson had raised this issue since I know he’s an advocate for modernising government through better use of technology, he’s a prolific blogger in his own right http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/ and was the primary driver in setting up the Power of Information Taskforce.
Tom Watson told the Reg:
“I’ve asked the questions because I feel sorry for the thousands of civil servants using the Austin Allegro of web browsers when they can have newer, faster alternatives. I want government CIOs to pull their fingers out.”
You can read the full article for yourselves, but I’ve abstracted the key points below:
- The Department of Justice and Foreign Office are in the process of upgrading
- The Department of Culture, Media and Sport expects to complete its move to IE7 by the end of August 2009.
- The Home Office quoted February 2010
- The Department of Health has no plans to upgrade
- The MOD currently has no plans to upgrade.
A pretty mixed bag then and pretty depressing reading on behalf of couple of departments. It also occurred to me why there isn’t an overarching strategy for web browsers across government. After all, isn’t this a key and fundamental component for doing ANY work on the intranet or the internet? And aren’t most staff in these departments dependent on being on-line as part of their daily routines?
I’d like to see this same question being asked of local government, where I suspect a similar pattern of complacency will emerge. In a strange paradox, government (central and local) put a high premium on security and accessibility for any new web services or technology procurement, but once vendors have jumped through all the appropriate hoops, a coach and horses can be driven through the whole process by insisting that the product or service will work with IE6 browsers. This places a huge burden on vendors who must ensure all features are backwards compatible with a browser that doesn’t comply with W3C standards and is full of security holes.
I know for a fact (given I am the business lead for the product) that a significant part of the development budget for the local government community of practice platform goes into ensuring that all the features work with IE6. I estimate that at least 20% savings could be made if backward compatibility extended only as far as IE7 – which does at least comply with most of the W3C standards.
The latest information on IE6 market share is just over 12%. I’m betting that a good proportion of this 12% is public sector workers who continue to be poorly served by their IT departments and CIOs who don’t see the browser as being an important component in improving user productivity.
I’d like to see a campaign similar to the one started by Mash the State (Twitter: http://twitter.com/mashthestate) which aims to get more councils to use RSS feeds, but this time to get central and local government to kick the IE6 habit – and quickly. My preference would be to give some choice to users on the browsers they use (I use Firefox because of the huge number of productivity plug-ins I can use), but I suspect this may be too ambitious. Let’s at least provide civil servants with a standards compatible browser that is more secure than IE6, offers some productivity enhancements and requires less development effort to make it work with standards-compliant web services.
Anyone up for getting a campaign started?
