Windows 7 and IE8 vs. entrenched software

[ghen]

Hoib's Benz thread got me thinking (sorry to hijack that thought). Has anyone tested their software against windows 7 yet? I tried with the release candidate and as exptected most things failed miserably. There was no XP mode at the time, so I'm going to be testing that soon as well. Since IE8 comes standard on Windows 7 it's another point of failure to test against.

Specific examples:

Hyundai's Parts section on it's website hates IE8. Compatibility view fixes most problems, but if
Hyundai support ever remotes into the computer the first thing they will do is install IE6. The rest of Hyundai's website work fine even though they say not to use IE8. (and in fact recommend IE5.5)

Higher Gear can work, but you have to turn off UAC as well as do some funny things during installation. Their help desk walked me through it, but in my final implementation I want UAC running as much as possible.

 

[Alex Snyder]

We've got everything except some manufacturer portals (Toyota & BMW mainly) to work on Windows 7 64 bit. Things fall apart on the 32 bit version. I am still shocked that ADP works fine.

 

[ghen]

ADP told me a while back they were fixing IE8 bugs so it's not so surprising once you set security to low-low settings It's basically a re-branded IE window with a terminal client built in and term windows will never change.

 

[mattwatson81]

It is sad that vendors who provide web based software don't keep up with the browser changes as they come along. I guess at the end of the day they just look at is an expense to upgrade.

The worst is dealer website providers who design websites to make use of the latest and greatest technology and then the dealerships themselves only have IE6 and can't even see what their customers can see... IE6 is under 15% market share and FireFox 3.5 is almost #1.

DailyTech - Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 Looks to Pass IE 7.0 in Browser Marketshare

I also think that if a web application doesn't work in all browsers, you shouldn't call it a web application.

 

[Alex Snyder]

IE6 is under 15% market share and FireFox 3.5 is almost #1.

I can see this on the home computing side, but not the business side. Most businesses do not allow anything other than IE. Most of our customers surf our site while they're at work, so the vast majority of browsers and OS's are Windows + IE. These stats change significantly after the 6:00 PM hour, but from 8:00 AM till 5:00 PM our website is speaking to Microsoft.

Here are our overall stats for December thus far into the month:
IE = 70%
FF = 15%
Safari = 11%
Others = 4%

 

[Hoib]

Yes, and we're getting close to the "end-of-the-year" so we need to pull the trigger on our buy before. I'm thinking that we have found WinXP systems out there with a future upgrade to Win7 promised. So, ghen and all of you are probably very right - in case of trouble, tech support isn't going to want to deal with anything other than what's on the spec sheet. And, thus we've painted ourselves into a corner.

Boy, this is a real problem...

 

[Hoib]

Hello all. I've posted our buy infor in another thread. If I get a chance I'll come back here with a brief summary of how our new XP 64 bit migration went. We have to transition this way unfortunately before we step into Win 7. We're going to hold off on Win 7 for now. If you've read what's on MS's site about migrating to Win 7, take a look because it's not a "slip-the-disk-in-and-walk-away" proposition! You have to take everything off, install Win 7 and then bring it all back. Hopefully the supplied migration wizard is built for real world situations like ours.

Anyway, the plane done took off...


H

 

[mattwatson81]

Hello all. I've posted our buy infor in another thread. If I get a chance I'll come back here with a brief summary of how our new XP 64 bit migration went. We have to transition this way unfortunately before we step into Win 7. We're going to hold off on Win 7 for now. If you've read what's on MS's site about migrating to Win 7, take a look because it's not a "slip-the-disk-in-and-walk-away" proposition! You have to take everything off, install Win 7 and then bring it all back. Hopefully the supplied migration wizard is built for real world situations like ours.

Anyway, the plane done took off...


H

Yeah XP to Windows 7 is a pretty much a bare metal reinstall. Vista to Windows 7 is a simple upgrade though. We have upgraded a bunch of Vista machines to 7 with no problems.