[johnny_reilly]

It's been my (unfortunate) experience that most enterprise / corporate environments lock down users machines heavily in the name of security. And with that goes the ability of the user to upgrade their browser. Oftentimes the reason is that there are old internal web applications which don't work in newer versions of IE / look rubbish in newer versions of IE. It's a pain. And it looks like the death of XP won't mean the death of IE 8 as many Win 7 shops are resisting the upgrade to IE 9 let alone 10.

[mcherm]

> [...] lock down users machines heavily in the name of security

And because the browsers aren't the more recent versions with more recent bug fixes, it may actually increase vulnerabilities, making things LESS secure.

[unreal37]

Not necessarily. I have a client that runs IE7 on all their machines, but those machines are completely locked down. We can't even run Webex on those things without IT coming down to install. Their own corporate website looks crappy on their own employee desktops, because the corporate anti-virus blocks one of the javascript's from running. (We had them whitelist it.) I challenge anyone to install any virus or malware on that thing.

[fpgeek]

Just because the lock-down was in the name of security doesn't mean that it's going actually help improve it...

[yuhong]

And the fun thing is that MS is actually willing to support IE8 on Win7 until Win7 ends support in 2020. For the record, they were willing to support IE 5.01 on Win2000 until 2010!