Over 20% of enterprise users reluctant to deploy Win7 due to IE6

Although Microsoft strongly encourages users to abandon IE6 and upgrade their browsers to IE8, many corporate users still do not buy it. According to Gartner, an authoritative market research agency, at least 20% of enterprise users have gone through plans to deploy Windows 7 due to concerns about IE6 compatibility issues.

Gartner analyst Michael Silver said: "Microsoft should explore more ways to help users get out of IE6 as soon as possible, rather than still supporting the outdated browser behind." Silver added that Microsoft can use this measure to clear the business Windows 7 obstacles on the road to deployment.

According to Net Applications, IE6 has a global market share of 15.6%. It is the third-largest browser version, ranking behind IE8 and Firefox. Most enterprise users still use IE6, because the business software they use or the self-developed software is only compatible with IE6.

Business users still adopting IE6 told Gartner that their custom browser-based applications could not run on IE8, so they faced the dilemma of choosing either to spend time and effort upgrading these applications to adapt to the new browser. Either continue to use Windows XP.

Gartner analysts believe that a compromise is to use virtualization tools so that they can run IE6 on Windows 7. However, Microsoft is opposed to virtualizing IE and believes it violates IE's license agreement. Since Microsoft's support for Windows XP SP3 was terminated in April 2014, corporate users still have to solve IE problems as soon as possible and start upgrading to Windows 7.