Pew Pew Laser Blog

Attention Corporate and Institutional System Admins and IT Policy Makers.

Internet Explorer is a 9 year old piece of software. It's doing pretty well for such an old collection of 1s and 0s. I wouldn't expect a developer to maintain an application this old, especially an application which was free in the first place. Microsoft does still patch IE6; though perhaps not as quickly as one would like.

Simply "grandfathering" software inside corporate certification policies doesn't seem like a good idea. Threats have evolved in the past decade, but IE6 has not. It is a huge security risk; far beyond simple stuff like popups and spyware. Recent highly sophisticated hacks stole source code from Google and breached over 30 other enterprise networks, including Adobe.. IE6 was a major point of entry for these hackers. They knew precisely what they were looking for, and how to get it.

If I had responsibility for a corporate network, not only would demand modern web applications; I would ban IE6 from usage, and probably IE7 too.

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