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by nostrademons 4090 days ago
Depending on what industry you're in, it's quite possible that your users won't care if they have to use Internet Explorer with ActiveX. A number of older and slower-to-change industries still require IE6 on corporate computers; supporting anything other than that is counterproductive, because their employers' IT departments won't permit them to load other browsers anyway.

I can't know if you're in one of these industries, but one of the virtues of experience is knowing when something isn't important because you know facts about your particular niche that an outsider wouldn't.
1 comments
therealwill 4090 days ago
It is a HIPAA regulated industry that deals with patient data.
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nostrademons 4090 days ago
That makes it far, far more likely that they're stuck on IE6. Last time I went to the doctor's office, I saw a lot of very old Windows machines. You may wish that the world was a certain way (and frankly, I do too), but that won't actually make the world a certain way.

If you want to win this technical battle, your best bet is to say "I'll implement it in ActiveX if you really believe it is necessary for the business. However, Microsoft ended support for WinXP and IE6 in 2014. They have been actively campaigning to get their customers off of it. There are A, B, and C startups out there with competitive offerings that work on the iPad. iPad market share among healthcare organizations has gone up from X to Y% in the last 3 years, while IE6 market share has declined from Z to W%. If we implement this software as an ActiveX control, we will lose out on $M in sales, with the worst-case scenario being that our userbase upgrades from IE6 and we find ourselves out of business with zero market. It's happening already, as you saw from the market share numbers I just shared with you."

Basically, put the fear of going out of business into your management chain, with the data to back it up. (And if you can't find that data - then your management is right, and you shouldn't bother upgrading.) That goes over a lot better than "I read you should never use IE6 for HIPAA data on the Internet."

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