For the past 6 month’s our CFO Theresa has been the only one in the office we left on Internet Explorer 6. We had asked her to take one for the team and stay on the older version of IE for testing purposes. This week she informed me that it’s time for an upgrade.
As the Financial Officer for The Technology Therapy Group, Theresa uses many online financial tools and has been required to use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer because of her version. This brought up a question:
Is it technology that should push us to upgrade?
Or is it the user who should push on technology to stay still for awhile?
There are two sides to this and I see them both. Personally, I get excited about new technology and often I am a first adopter. When it comes to running my business, however I prefer to wait for second generation technology due to bugs, patches and productivity.
This question is one we can all debate because it seems many times that software companies are forcing us every year to spend money on new applications with little change to their tools or increased value. The flip-side is; how long do we continue to support those who will not move forward? Individuals stuck on older technology because they are comfortable and fear change?
As a web development company we require a level of backward compatibility on older browsers; however we drew a line in the sand in 2009 and decided as of 2010 to build websites that were compatible with IE 7 & 8, Firefox 2 & 3, Safari and Google’s Chrome. If you open our website in IE 6 you will see a message asking you to upgrade.
We will be upgrading Theresa next week to Internet Explorer 8 but tell us what you think of this issue we’d love to hear your point of view.
