Don’t go out there! It’s unsafe! We’ll protect you!

(or, The IT Dept that wouldn’t let their businesses move past IE9 - or, the greatest IT lie of recent years)

Yep, I’ve seen it happen many time in talking to the clients I work with on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it’s a load of toss. Even in huge multimedia events companies, IE still rules the roost. Badly.

It’s the lie that was cultivated back in the days when no unauthorised software was allowed to be installed to a company machine (and rightly so) to prevent malware, spyware, etc etc (The list goes on…)

“Sorry, we can’t upgrade you past Internet Explorer 9. The higher versions aren’t verified by us as being secure, and it’ll take us a significant amount of time to roll this out across the board.”

Then things started getting a bit hairy for the IT dept. Browsers started releasing security and functionality updates automatically. You might be lucky enough to notice this if you work somewhere with a confident IT dept - “Chrome was updated whilst you were away! See the new features”.

The paranoid IT department of a large business (or even small businesses in some cases!) might find themselves beginning to fear for their roles.

“Wait - if the browsers are updating themselves… Who needs us?”

In this new age of the empowered user, the old-school IT tech’s days are numbered. We don’t need you to tell us that we’re not allowed to upgrade our browsers due to security issues… That’s actually totally backwards.

Old browsers that don’t receive updates and patches are more and more vulnerable, every day they’re not updated. That’s a bigger security risk than installing a new browser from a trusted source.

The new age of the web browser is a pretty cool place. You’ll finally be able to see the wonderful new developments and leaps forward that have been made in web design. I mean - dare I say it - even Internet Explorer’s new incarnation, ‘Edge’ - isn’t bad at all. It certainly hasn’t got the hate following that IE8 managed to incite, and the feature lists seem to stack up there with the best of them…

Not only that, but you’ll be thanked by web devs everywhere, for finally putting your old browsers out to pasture.

If you need to find out just how far in the past you are, go to https://updatemybrowser.org/ - then compare your version number to the latest version.