UK government: Upgrading away from IE6 costs too much

I think it would be most sensible to at least create a strategy for moving away from IE6.<p>The UK government's current stance doesn't address the problem .. it postpones doing anything until support runs out in 2014.<p>What will happen then?

This is like saying that saving taxpayers money today is saving the taxpayers money in general. This is totally untrue - 5 years of malware, support tickets, etc. that need not be there costs way more than doing the transition now versus having to do it later anyway.

At the moment, the UK Government can barely afford a sandwich and a cup of tea, let alone a major IT upgrade.<p>When support eventually runs out then the benefits of switching will clearly outweigh the costs, but at a time when we're talking about reducing the number of MPs and selling off whole government departments, I can't blame them. Maybe the last government could have averted this, maybe not, but at the moment we're such deep economic shit that it's just not a priority.<p>(disclosure: I voted Tory, I hate IE, I enjoy both sandwiches and tea)

Despite the last paragraph in the article, another reason for refusing to upgrade is the costs involved in service pack upgrades. IE 7 is only available for Windows XP SP2 and higher. Upgrading to SP2 was traumatic for many organizations, so quite a few did not roll it out.<p>No upgrade from SP2? Well, IE 6 and only IE 6 it is then.<p>A related issue: IE 8 offers the ability to run in IE 7 compatibility mode, with the inclusion of a header in the source web page. Despite dire warnings to the contrary, some website developers for UK government insist on setting the header and declaring that IE 8 compatibility has been achieved. I can't wait to see how that will end, to be honest.

I totally agree. I actually worked on a closed government system back in the day. The plain fact is that they moved to Web apps a long time ago. Most of the web apps are geared towards IE6 and the messed up style guide. This means that even if they try to upgrade some of their military operations will not be working correctly and there for need a style upgrade... I know of just three projects like this. Building for IE6 when IE8 was out was horrendous. So I imagine there are a ton more projects just like it.

Stupid. IE6 won't be around forever and upgrading to IE9/IE10/IEx will not be cheaper then.

They should at least install Chrome Plugin.