UK Benefits Claimants Must Use Windows XP, IE6 230
First time accepted submitter carlypage3 writes "Benefits claimants in the UK are being forced to use Microsoft's now obsolete Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 software. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) states that its online forms are not compatible with Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9 and 10, Safari, Google Chrome or Firefox. As if that wasn't unnerving enough, the Gov.UK website says that users cannot submit claims using Mac OS X or Linux operating systems, either."
(Note: as we noted not long ago, it's not just the DWP that's stuck using IE6.)
Antique website (Score:4, Interesting)
One give-away is that the site uses ASP (rather than ASP.NET). I doubt any new site has been written using ASP for over ten years! (ASP.NET came out in 2002).
So there we have it, an antique, a living fossil. Enjoy it while it is still up.
Re:I honestly don't understand why.... (Score:5, Interesting)
> Simple. It's because of how things run in public services.
Yes and no. Some of it is just that old Demon Money(tm) and the fact that we were in a protracted recession.
We were using a certain company for ad insertion on our Web streams. (Three radio stations total.) We were having trouble getting the software to work, so we contacted their help/support team. They used VNC to look at our system and said, "we only support Windows XP."
I sent them a rather nastily-worded letter. They claimed to be cutting edge, with the ability to sort and insert commercial content intelligently, and all other sorts of bells and whistles. And yet, I said, "you will only support a 10-year old operating system?"
They replied and allowed (as someone granting a great concession) that they would work with us, but could make no guarantees. We canceled the contract and went with another company.
In this case, it's simple: they hired someone to write the package several years ago, and wanted to re-sell the same package again and again. They didn't want to pay to update the software. So, they lost a lot of business. Assuming they're not bankrupt now, I hope they learned an important lesson. :)
Re:Actually this is a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Where it doesn't work, some greasemonkey magic is all you need. Sometimes that magic is substantial (1000s of lines), but I've got sites that are IE-only by design and rely on IE APIs to work on both Safari and Firefox. I've even re-implemented some ActiveX controls using plain old javascript. Given the amount of effort (a couple weeks in the evenings) by someone who doesn't do such a thing very often, I think that the site developers should be publicly shamed. As in rotten tomatoes or eggs thrown at them in the middle of the city square, or something like that.
Re:I honestly don't understand why.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Works in my shitty EU member country why wouldn't it work for the brits too.
Because, in British government, corruption of this type is pretty rare. I have worked with the UK government as a supplier on many IT contracts and I have never seen corruption like that. What I have seen is gross incompetence leading to wastage of tax payers' money on an almost unimaginable scale.
My guess is (it is only a guess, I wasn't involved) that, in this case, the supplier told them it would cost more money to support the other browser (back in 2000 there was mostly IE and some Netscape and then just a tiny handful of weirdos running stuff like Mozilla) and it would have been pointed out that even the people with other browsers could fire up IE if they needed to, so I'm sure they just went with IE for cost reasons.
having narrowed the supported platform down to IE, the chosen supplier would not have felt constrained to use only standards compliant features and that would have locked the DWP in to the one technology.
Then there would be no money available to fix the UI because "everybody uses IE 6" until the point where the falsehood of that statement could not be denied and then the DWP would already be thinking about the shiny new system that ail be replacing that old system, so there would still be no money available. But the shiny new system was probably slated to arrive about now but has slipped by a couple of years due to incompetent management and so on.