I get the impression that many companies have internal applications that were written to be compatible with IE6... software written by employees or consultants who are no longer available.

The mere act of enumerating IE7 incompatibilities in these applications (let alone fixing them) represents a development cost that some companies will put off for as long as possible.

Would it be possible to write a proxy that converts IE6-HTML/CSS into good-HTML/CSS?

Then you could upgrade $(Initech) to IE7/Firefox, and slap the proxy between the users and the legacy web apps, and everybody's happy. When the internal developers upgrade the legacy web app, they can either keep it on the un-IE6-proxy, or upgrade its output and lose the proxy. IE6 can go away, we can stop wasting time with IE6 compatibility, everybody's happy, world peace, the end.

Disclaimer: I don't understand the nature of IE6 bugs very well at all, and I don't know if this is turing-complete or AI-complete or what.

Tricky, since most of these apps which can run in IE6 but not IE7 do bad things in JavaScript too. That means you can't just fix CSS issues in a proxy, because even if you could document every IE6 bug and how to fix it for IE7, the page could still change after it is loaded in the browser.

why can't they just let people install firefox, and use ie6 for internal apps, and firefox for external apps?

At my Fortune 500 company, permission to use Firefox is only granted to programmers who can convincingly argue that they need it for compatibility testing on Internet-facing applications. It's IE6 for everything else. The reason is that Firefox is a security risk(!).

Because the people that do desktop support don't want to support more browsers than the minimum possible. I'd bet a decent proportion of desktop support calls are about 'problems with the internet' (read: browser) and starting every one of those call with "are you using IE or Firefox?" would most likely get answered with: "I dunno! I want to use Google!"

heh

"we got a problem here, uh yeah, the website is down"

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/

In some cases, because the company in question feels you shouldn't need external access at work.

If the company doesn't allow external internet access, it isn't relevant to anyone deciding what browsers their website should support.

Just because an employee shouldn't access the internet at such companies, doesn't mean he/she doesn't

When IE6 was released isn't the issue, it's when IE7, Microsoft's replacement for IE6, was released. October 2006. We are quickly approaching IE7's two year birthday. Two years is still a long time.