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by protocow 4521 days ago
Well done. But many IE7 and IE8 users aren't by choice. They are employees at large companies with no ability to upgrade their corporate computers.
5 comments

I'm surprised no one has yet created a database where people can anonymously submit ranges of IPs where a lot of users are on IE7 and other older browsers. This would paint a big ol' bullseye on those organizations since it highlights them as easy targets for exploits that target older browsers.
Do these corporations not have security issues with these old browsers?
You're assuming corporations take security seriously.
The newer browsers actually come with a lot of feature-induced security problems too. Microsoft continues to release security updates for IE7 so it might be better to use than a newer version of IE that could have HTML5 exploits.
That support ends on April 8 of this year: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/endofsuppo...
On WinXP. You can run it on Server 2008 and receive security updates until 2020.
Interesting, but who's running Server 2008 as a corporate desktop OS?
Everybody with a Terminal Server installation from 2008. It's actually surprisingly common :/
Probably no-one. I can think of a bunch of people who run it as a Terminal Server though.
IE8 and older also have things like HTML+TIME which is used in at least one real world exploit, to name just one thing.
Yes they have.

I work on one of those (I'm the webmaster), they didn't wanted to get me firefox or chrome, because of 'security issues'...

You can take it from the other end. These employees are locked on IE7/8 because there's not enough external forces to make it a business issue. When they won't be able to use critical resources because of their browser or OS, the upgrade will just happen, how painful and costly it will be (as long as it's less costly than not accessing the said resources)
If this were python, people would be arguing that IE8 does nothing new and maybe we should fork IE7 and continue using that forever
Actually I agree with this line of thinking. I we could in fact fork IE7, replace it at the system level and people were enthusiastic enough to patch bugs and security holes forever, why not.
True enough - but it sounds like the site making the offer is a job-board.
And hospitals post job offers for nurses from their fleet of home PCs, right?
One might ask why they're looking for nursing jobs at work then.
Probably because they're at a job so crappy that their employer forces them to use IE7.
"Screw you nerds, i'm going to change bedpans for the elderly"
From what I understand, there's a reasonably large market for temporary nurses, for times when a hospital is understaffed. I suspect it's acceptable to look for a new gig before your current one ends.

Edit: It also looks like hospitals, not nurses, are the actual customers.

One might ask how those job offers end up on the site. Other unemployed nurses, or hospitals?
People even use their current work emails for job applications.
Someone should probably tell them not to do that.
Maybe they don't have computers at home.