Keep your browser updated

Financial and Health industries are notorious for being slow to adopt better technology and instead cling to inferior hardware/software beyond the logical pain point, web browsers included. As a general philosophy I recommend it would be healthy for these industries to adopt the policy that web browsers be kept updated and applications used by the company be maintained to work correctly with modern browsers.

Here are three good reasons to keep browsers updated:

First, old browsers (and the OS they run on) are vulnerable to attacks.

Second, the web evolves quickly. Old browsers will miss out.

Third, old browsers slow down innovation on the web.

I worked with a previous client who insisted on a dynamic Web 2.0 look to the complex web application I was designing but also demanded compatibility with IE7. Delivering on both of these requirements (latest Internet bells and whistles, like mobile browser compatibility and AJAX, as well as backward compatibility with older browser versions) increases the difficulty level and cost of the site development considerably for a number of reasons:

• First you have to test on these older browser versions in addition to testing on the common browsers, which increases the development time. It is not just twice the work, because you have to worry about supporting all browsers with a single application, making a single change requires testing all browsers to make sure fixing an issue in one browser does not break something in another.
• Next you have to pare down features and functionality so that it works consistently everywhere, so you might have had a nice dynamic form element or navigation control working in IE9 and FireFox 4, but it all gets tossed out when it cannot work in IE7 (see holding up innovation reason given above).
• Also, for some "must have" site features or functionality: developers will usually have to code around older browser version quirks, so instead of writing code in one place to perform a task, it is written one place or one way for modern browsers and another place or another way for older browsers (see slowing down the web). This causes a code maintenance issue as you now have multiple places to check to fix problems or update code for a single feature or site behavior. This is a problem for HTML, CSS, and Javascript as all three can behave differently on different browsers.
• Yet another problem that can arise is your Javascript/CSS performance can vary widely in different browser flavors and versions, for example IE7 Javascript benchmarks are miserably slow when compared with more recent versions of IE and other browsers like FireFox or Chrome. This can cause problems where failing to test on the required browser versions can really bite you.
• If a performance issue (or any browser version issue) is found late in the development cycle, either because the testing was not done along side development in that version or because developers only used modern browsers for their self verification and validation of the application, then the time needed to fix the entire problem is much larger and more difficult than if it had been caught earlier because much more code is in place to review and repair and test.

99% of businesses do not have the resources to provide application support on dozens of browsers versions, it is less expensive to support the current browsers than to support historical ones. Developers are much happier working with current tech than outdated tech as well. Your clients may not want to upgrade their browsers, they may ‘need’ the old browser to access a neglected internal application which only works with a specific legacy browser, but clients refusing to update their software and maintain their web applications are hurting themselves (and you) in several ways:

1. old software makes their business less competitive (faster browsers/computers make a more efficient workforce);
2. old/inferior software has high hidden costs (performance issues, functional issues, security vulnerabilities, feature limitations, and incompatibilities with emerging technologies);
3. outsourced development vendors always find doing business with clients clinging to old software is more expensive and they increase their bids accordingly (I saw this first hand many times working as a consultant);
4. some development vendors even flat out refuse business which requires older browser compatibility as a policy / business strategy. This allows their developers freedom to ignore issues only present in older browsers and they can therefore innovate more efficiently.

Newer IE browsers can run in a legacy mode, emulating the previous versions, for those rare cases where a legacy browser mode is needed to use a web site. You can even set preferences for specific sites such that certain sites always use a compatibility mode. The barrier to upgrading to a new browser is mostly self-inflicted because browser creators do everything possible to encourage adoption of the newer version.