Yeah corporate apps had support for IE6 ...and that was it. If you weren't using the internal business tool with IE6, the developers were under no obligation to even respond to your email.

Another big thing was IE6 was supported by pretty much every online bank, particularly in South Korea, which is not a huge market, but SK was one of the last, most advanced economies to switch off IE6, primarily due to banking platforms.

Didn’t they use ActiveX plug-ins for their authentication?

It was surprisingly reasonable. They developed their own standard because the US restricted the export of strong SSL, and then had a hard time upgrading when that changed.

> It wouldn't surprise me if people are still running IE6 in some virtual environment to be able to access such apps.

I've worked on a project ~2y ago to rewrite the software powering the whole core business of a huge company (multi-hundreds-of-millions-a-year revenue I'd guess), the existing software being done somewhat like this, although it was a heavy client rather than web.

A guy developped software to automate his job 25y+ ago with some microsoft tech (FoxPro), somehow the whole company ended up using it and the software kept growing until it was fundamental to the business. For some reason it only ran on something like Windows 95, so they got Windows95 servers that you had to connect to remotely just to use the software. It was incredibly slow of course, and you couldn't copy-paste through the virtualisation layer, which drove everybody crazy for years.

The guy had developped that in his free time apparently (wasn't employed as a software developer), pretty good deal for the company who exploited that for decades and became a major player in the industry.