Santa Clara is the saint of semiconductors. Cough
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UK government supports continued use of IE6
ALTHOUGH MANY have lambasted Internet Explorer 6 and its often criticised insecurity, it seems that the UK government is content with its performance.
Lord Avebury asked Her Majesty's government whether it would be correct to reconsider the use of IE6, and whether the government should encourage public sector users to switch to another web browser due to security concerns.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, Lord West of Spithead replied, "Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. We take Internet security very seriously and we have worked with Microsoft and other suppliers over many years to understand the security of the products used by HMG, including Internet Explorer."
He continued, "There is no evidence that moving from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure. Regular software patching and updating will help defend against the latest threats."
Basically stating that the government is unmoved by any possible security threats of IE6, despite the recent Google-China hacking debacle that was alleged to have occurred due to exploits in Microsoft's legacy browser.
Unlike the UK government, Google is stopping support of IE6 in its products - it has announced that Google Apps and Google websites will begin phasing out support for the older browser in about one month.
Google suggests pretty much any other browser in its place. µ
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The NHS is utterly fubard regarding ie6, they are utterly dependent of Apps that have been lashed together by utter incompetants that rely on using hacks and undocumented shortcuts throughout the Dll's that make up ie5 and 6.
so when you try to run such apps on ie7 or god forbid ie8 they are utterly broken, as both are complete reworks compared to what came before.
It doesnt help that the management of the development was done by multiple comitties so the programers were forced to lash it all together on the fly and beyond deadline(BAU for gov.uk).
The probable release of the next software release that might! be ie7 compatable is at minimum 3 years away if they are going to follow the same broken development process again, by which time were all on ie10 which wont be compatable with ie7 either.
Meantime anyone who wants 500k+ complient bots, look no further than the NHS.GOV.UK
My friend, it is no expert that said there was no evidence, it is a bona-fide, officially-sanctioned government mouthpiece.
And you'd better believe there is no evidence if he says so. After all, he has spent a lifetime ignoring evidence, strangling it or sweeping it under the rug to know.
we get advice to use the "latest fully patched versions".
YES, but eventually one should catch on that M$ and especially IE problems are due to lousy design that's difficult if not impossible to fix.
IE, at the least, is *still* tightly tied to the kernel (rendering engine), and that's the source of much of its vulnerability. I'm not an expert on IE -- simply dodge all its problems with Firefox -- but there's also Active-X, another bad design idea as its purpose is remote control of the browser.
And I *really* have to question this "expert" when he says there's "no evidence". Phooey.
I think you should re-read the question and answer. At no point was version 6.0 mentioned. The answer stated "the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer". I would hope that they mean IE 8, not 6.
If they have internal web sites that require IE 6, they're likely to have as much compatibility trouble with IE 8 as they will with Firefox, Safari or Chrome. However, you can use exactly the same patch management tools with IE 8 as with version 6.