That headline has made the rounds, and I can see why. Some entities require validation of new browsers before deployment, and Firefox's new schedule kinda gets in the way of validation periods that are longer than 3 months.
As usual, Ars Technica has a nice opinion piece on this one. Read it here.
Their argument is very much focused about the good of the web as a whole. Stick-in-the-mud corporate types that only update browsers every 2-3 years bring everyone back to the dark ages, and that just ain't right. The web is a fast moving thing, and clients need frequent updates to make the whole thing a better experience for everyone. They're not wrong!
But...
Corporate types (and even Governmental offices) like to restrict internet access to only 'business-appropriate' usage. Or even, business-only if they can get away with it. Social-media blocks are common at corporate internet borders, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The browser on your work-machine is for accessing work webapps, period. Anything else is incidental, and secondary to the work webapps.
When you can restrict what parts of the web a client-base can see, and can also maintain high control over what you do allow, then the features of your browser become something that corporate decision processes can manage. I've long suspected that statistics of IE6 usage are under-reported due to corporate internet access restrictions preventing those IE6 users from hitting the right statistics gatherers.
I know of corporate-types who consider office web-app upgrades the same kind of decision as office-productivity software upgrades; something you do once every couple of years. And if that 3 year old web-app still works best with IE6, well that's what you use. Microsoft has long had the kind of controls in place to actually enforce this kind of thing, which is why IE is still king of the corporate network.
Corporates are far less interested in the good of the web than they are in the good of the company. Some may consider the good of the web to be the good of the company, but I suspect they're the small minority. For the rest using old Cold Fusion applications written for IIS5, they'll stick with what works, thank you very much, and damn the rest. They shouldn't be going there anyway.
But what can be done about this? Microsoft's Compatibility Mode in IE is designed specifically for these older browser-quirks, which is why IE upgrades are higher than they otherwise would be in the corporate space. That's one option.
The other option is simple attrition. Some corporate types don't upgrade major systems more than once every 5 years due to the expense of doing so. Eventually they'll upgrade to something with a better backwards compatibility mechanism than what they've got now, and might keep up finally. ALL of the big browser players (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and even Opera) have embraced incremental improvements over minor point-revs.
Unfortunately, nothing is going to stop some corporations from their "twice a decade" upgrade pace for major systems. If those systems present an HTTP interface, that 5 year old interface will still be a critical line-of-business item that'll need validation in the face of every incremental browser improvement. Some will get with the program and validate new-feature point-revs quicker than they have. Others will just stick to a single browser until such time as change is either unavoidable or permitted by the critical system.
As usual, Ars Technica has a nice opinion piece on this one. Read it here.
Their argument is very much focused about the good of the web as a whole. Stick-in-the-mud corporate types that only update browsers every 2-3 years bring everyone back to the dark ages, and that just ain't right. The web is a fast moving thing, and clients need frequent updates to make the whole thing a better experience for everyone. They're not wrong!
But...
Corporate types (and even Governmental offices) like to restrict internet access to only 'business-appropriate' usage. Or even, business-only if they can get away with it. Social-media blocks are common at corporate internet borders, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The browser on your work-machine is for accessing work webapps, period. Anything else is incidental, and secondary to the work webapps.
When you can restrict what parts of the web a client-base can see, and can also maintain high control over what you do allow, then the features of your browser become something that corporate decision processes can manage. I've long suspected that statistics of IE6 usage are under-reported due to corporate internet access restrictions preventing those IE6 users from hitting the right statistics gatherers.
I know of corporate-types who consider office web-app upgrades the same kind of decision as office-productivity software upgrades; something you do once every couple of years. And if that 3 year old web-app still works best with IE6, well that's what you use. Microsoft has long had the kind of controls in place to actually enforce this kind of thing, which is why IE is still king of the corporate network.
Corporates are far less interested in the good of the web than they are in the good of the company. Some may consider the good of the web to be the good of the company, but I suspect they're the small minority. For the rest using old Cold Fusion applications written for IIS5, they'll stick with what works, thank you very much, and damn the rest. They shouldn't be going there anyway.
But what can be done about this? Microsoft's Compatibility Mode in IE is designed specifically for these older browser-quirks, which is why IE upgrades are higher than they otherwise would be in the corporate space. That's one option.
The other option is simple attrition. Some corporate types don't upgrade major systems more than once every 5 years due to the expense of doing so. Eventually they'll upgrade to something with a better backwards compatibility mechanism than what they've got now, and might keep up finally. ALL of the big browser players (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and even Opera) have embraced incremental improvements over minor point-revs.
Unfortunately, nothing is going to stop some corporations from their "twice a decade" upgrade pace for major systems. If those systems present an HTTP interface, that 5 year old interface will still be a critical line-of-business item that'll need validation in the face of every incremental browser improvement. Some will get with the program and validate new-feature point-revs quicker than they have. Others will just stick to a single browser until such time as change is either unavoidable or permitted by the critical system.