211–220 of 282 posts
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It is the reality of the situation in a vast amount of companies.
Only because we let them. I'm very much against auto-updating software, but I still don't see this as a good argument against them. It's not that companies can't keep up, it's that companies choose not to keep up. In this aspect, taking away their choice is the winning move, imo
Is this about replacing one monopoly with another? It is slowly starting too look like in the early 00's, most developers are starting to support only chrome, with no testing in Firefox or latest IE. On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) - this is WinXP-IE6 all over again.
Maybe because (almost) no one uses it? It's definitely a vicious cycle (If there are no users, there won't be any testing on that platform. If there is no testing on that platform, there are no users.).
Developer time/resources are not unlimited. It's not worth their while to target an obscure platform.
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Only because we let them. I'm very much against auto-updating software, but I still don't see this as a good argument against them. It's not that companies can't keep up, it's that companies choose not to keep up. In this aspect, taking away their choice is the winning move, imo
The only thing you do by "taking away their choice" is to force them to use alternatives that are not Google Chrome.
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I question if you've worked with large enterprises. They freeze everything for a decade or more. Think about a bank with 500 offices, a dozen tellers at each office. Having their internal web app that everyone uses go down because of an auto upgrade could cost them hundreds of millions. They have a very different risk appetite.
That doesn't mean this is a good practice. In fact, I would argue that this type of thinking has created far more harm than good for both the IT industry as well as the companies that adopt this harmful practice. Case in point: many of these same companies that refuse to upgrade systems for a decade or more are still running Windows XP and Server 2003. Due to the negligence of their IT leadership, they are now vulner…
If maintaining critical infrastructure like bridges and tunnels worked like deploying software updates, every few weeks the bridge or tunnel would close itself to traffic in one direction for a while, without warning.
Every now and then when the tunnel reopened, it would feature a loop-the-loop hidden inside the mountain. While it looked the same from outside, it would therefore become completely impassable by large amounts of the traffic that used to rely on it, including ambulances, food supplies, and the CEO's limo.
Every couple of years, your world famous suspension bridge, used as a widely recognised landmark by millions, would be redesigned more like a Roman aqueduct. With traffic driving on the opposite side of the road. And a high speed railway line running right down one of the traffic lanes. With warning signals that are supposed to alert motorists to the danger, but in practice don't because none of the motorists know what the funny symbols mean.
When software engineering is at least on the same planet as civil engineering, and software updates are subject to the same standards of oversight and approval before being deployed, we can talk. Until then, organisations can and will see software as a tool that is there to do a job, and view updates to working software as a high risk that isn't worth taking if it might stop that software from doing its job. It might be inconvenient for the software developers, who naturally would prefer everyone to bend to their will and never to have to maintain anything older than five minutes, but those software developers are going to have to realise at some point that the world doesn't revolve around them.
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>I miss proper custom desktop apps with horrible looking cluttered interfaces. Soo productive compared to any web based interface for almost all tasks. You mean where everything runs on the UI thread? Gotta pass on that. :)
Heh, the MS Windows file/folder permissions tab comes to mind when you mention that. Been single-threaded for 20+ years now. Clicking on the Add... button always freezes the UI while it communicates with the domain controller or whatever it does. http://imgur.com/a/YbGbU
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I think this is a weak argument. The problem here is that companies think that software can exist in some sort of "done" state, where no further updates or development is required. That has never been true. The hardware and software changes. The infrastructure it connects to changes. But most importantly, your workflows must evolve if you are to remain efficient. If you roll your own software, you either commit to co…
I wish I could paste a screenshot of my desktop with Oracle EBS (enterprise business suite) windows open-- it looks like something straight out of 1997. Horrifically bad interfaces that burn through users' time and patience with no end in sight and surly non-responsive staff running it. Efficiency be damned, and yes, people are perfectly happy to throw money down the drain to keep it running.
Is this about replacing one monopoly with another? It is slowly starting too look like in the early 00's, most developers are starting to support only chrome, with no testing in Firefox or latest IE. On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) - this is WinXP-IE6 all over again.
This is logical. If you have limited developer resources, it makes sense to target the most popular combos first. Until we have true "write once run anywhere" it will always be this way.
Chrome is the new IE. Enterprise apps are being developer with the assumption that they will only even be run on Chrome, and become fragile because of that assumption. A recent example: someone has set up a race condition of timers that was only working (i.e. resolving in a specific order that is needed for the app to work) in Webkit-based browsers. No one cared to fix that, because it did work in Chrome, and that's…
Is anyone else concerned that this means IT can choose to hold back the version of Chrome in their organizations? Auto-updating Chrome has been low key one of the best solutions to the pain of backwards compatibility with older browsers. In the past we not only had to worry about compatibility between browsers, we had to worry about compatibility between browser versions. Further, auto-updating Chrome as dramatically…
Companies have far too much internal plumbing to permit browsers to auto-update themselves. Being feature-compatible with the latest SV-poster-child website is insignificant compared to maintaining stability for the tax-management team's internal web app. I was once involved in an IE6 -> IE8 upgrade for a Fortune 100 corporation. It took nine months to analyze all the possible impacts and implement mitigations before…
Using ancient versions of IE to get work done was awful and in the current security environment, I don't think it's safe for a browser that's not in its own VM. Heck, you could use Chrome Remote Desktop!
Is this about replacing one monopoly with another? It is slowly starting too look like in the early 00's, most developers are starting to support only chrome, with no testing in Firefox or latest IE. On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) - this is WinXP-IE6 all over again.