Last November, IEEE Spectrum Senior Editor Harry Goldstein wrote a piece titled, "We Come to Bury IE6," that discussed the lingering death of Windows Internet Explorer 6 which was released in 2001.
Well, according to UK news reports, IE6 will be lingering for a while longer, at least in the UK government.
The London Telegraph, among others, is reporting that the UK government has said that it will not be upgrading from IE6 any time soon.
Responding to a petition started by a web site design company which asked the new Prime Minister David Cameron to encourage the government to upgrade, the government instead said IE6 was just fine for its needs.
Indeed, a fully patched IE6 was sufficiently secure for government operations, and that there was no evidence that more recent browsers were more secure.
Furthermore, the Telegraph quotes the the government as saying:
"It is not straightforward for government departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems... Upgrading these systems to IE8 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 government 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."
"The Government continues to work with Microsoft and other Internet browser suppliers to understand the security of the products used by the Government, including Internet Explorer and we welcome the work that Microsoft are continuing do on delivering security solutions which are deployed as quickly as possible to all Internet Explorer users."
One wonders how the UK government ever convinced itself to upgrade from the Colossus.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.