limbo - 6:16 pm on Oct 13, 2009 (gmt 0)

I recently did some research recently on some major UK organisations and it confirmed our suspicions:

The NHS has over 750,000 workstations and laptops nationwide. IE6 is installed on all these by default - it takes a specific requirement from the local trust to add a different version. The DWP, with 500,000 workstations, follows suit. These are two national government departments; There are over 50 more in the UK alone. Couple that with large corporations and local government and you can start to see why IE6 still has a large market share.

The infrastucutre needed to test, rollout and deliver a new piece of software, and the others it impacts, over massive networks, is simply monstrous. I worked on the IT programme that installed IE6 (+ servers, XP etc) for the DWP in 2002/3 and it was a huge undertaking - there was a team of over 300 staff on the project alone, working for over 3 years.

Good news on the horizon mind you—if I can use the DWP and NHS as benchmarks—both are working on full support, to allow the upgrade of the workstations to IE7. Not IE8 yet tho - not until they implement Vista or W7 I guess.

Personally I offer limited support for IE6. Most users (FF, Safari, IE7 etc) get the full experience the richer, nice to haves, whilst maintaining the usablity/functionality for IE6 users too.

Luckily it is very easy to target IE6, so although I do spend a long time browser testing, I know I can just kill off a few items and leave IE enough scraps to make do.