[sliverstorm]

I am not part of the DoD, but as I understand it a lot of entrenched usage of IE6 these days is usually internal apps. So, perhaps they use IE6 for private networks, and use IE8, Firefox, et al for public-facing workstations.

[beedogs]

But IE6 won't even run on new versions of Windows. You'd need to run up a VM on a user's machine with a copy of XP.

What's the refresh cycle at DoD? Two decades?

[AndrewDucker]

If you have thousands of machines running an OS that works perfectly well for your purposes, then you only upgrade when support lapses, which is 2014 in this case.

[27182818284]

I'm not buying it. This is the reason always given, and in real life I've not come across this as the actual reason. 99% of the time it is lack of staff and will not lack of "We don't know how to make the adjustments to make it work."

I've also seen universities with faculty and staff still using IE7 not because of infrastructure requirements, but just because nobody had come around to upgrade because they hadn't bitched loudly enough.

[recursive]

What's the difference? There's no compelling business reason to upgrade.

[sliverstorm]

So, you just keep using XP.

They probably have internal interfaces that aren't forward compatible, and re-factoring anything inside the DoD has got to be stupid expensive.

[molmalo]

I don't know the internals of the DOD, but I bet that it's not too much for the costs (that doesn't seem to be a big problem there), but the human resources being used in other priorities.

[tcpekin]

At the large research university I work at in a lab, almost all of the computers run XP, and a few even run Windows 2000. Is it frustrating to use IE6 on the Windows 2000 computer? Yes. However, the software for the old equipment we have is designed for Windows 2000, and most likely will never be upgraded, for lack of support for newer OSs. I don't think (anecdotal evidence) that a 10-15 year refresh cycle is absurd on some machines. That being said, for the entire DoD to not at least update some of their workstations is a little incredible.

[freehunter]

IE6 isn't the only XP-only app I have to use in my daily job, so it's entirely feasible that members of the DoD are still using XP.