Working in a ~50000 employee company that shall remain nameless I can give you another datapoint from "big companies" out there:

We only got IE8 (on WinXP, Win7 will not launch for another year or two) this year. And before that it was whatever IE version ships with WinXP.

The alternative we can use is a Firefox that has not been updated since its rollout in 2009. And of course you are not allowed to use other than company-managed software, especially web-browsers are tightly regulated, exceptions granted only for a few chosen employees.

The policy regarding webbrowsers explicitly states that this is done to avoid having people running outdated versions of them...

Here's what I don't get. (Maybe someone here can help answer this.) My company, with 18,000 employees, recently decided to upgrade workstations from IE6 to IE7. It wasn't entirely seamless - employees still had to double-click a desktop icon to kick off the upgrade. What I don't understand is why they upgraded to IE7. Once you're going through the friction of doing an upgrade at all, why not go all the way? Is the retraining coefficient that much more for IE8 (or 9) vs. IE7?

I can't say what happened at your company, but at mine (which is a bit bigger), the IT people started "qualifying" IE7 when it came out. It took them until after IE8 was released to get all the various internal groups working and tested on IE7. The testing part was really the big piece, so they couldn't just jump to IE8 when it was released because it would have meant months or years redoing the testing cycle.

Exactly. My experience at work is that we "bootleg" in other browsers to do dev work on external facing sites, but the intranet stuff really only works on Internet Exploder, and thems the breaks.

While it's laughable, I understand the driving forces behind it, and have since stopped caring, so long as nobody insists that our public sites need only work on IE 6/7/8. I can usually end that discussion with one word: iPad.

Wow that's amazing, sometimes I wonder how IT staff get up in the morning and go to sleep at night. Could it be that they are using some sort of monitoring software that actually utilises the flaws in these out of date browsers?

No, it's because they can't spare support resources for other browsers. If they know the flaws they have to support workarounds for, they keep support to a manageable level.

They could, of course, just hire more support staff, but then their productivity would drop and the CEO would have to shave five feet off the length of his next yacht.

A workforce on an old browser is an awesome way to stagnate innovation. If you complain about this on some sites (ahem...reddit), you will receive replies from thousands of self-loathing IT staffers who will give you a thousand bullshit reasons why supporting even newish browsers is "impossible" for a large company.

In nearly every case, the old browser in the standard image is there because of some terrible legacy software from the late 1990s that: (1) was premised on the notion that the runtime environment would never change, and (2) is licensed from a vendor who charges obscene amounts of money for any change. Either that, or some useless "intranet" that nobody invested in since 1998.

I will never for the life of me understand why these companies don't create desktop shortcuts to the IE6-based tools, and let employees do their other browsing in a newer browser. It comes down to laziness and apathy, and the dynamics of a big company that has matured to the point where too many second-rate, CYA-oriented people infiltrate the ranks of management and operations.

The cost of retraining thousands of non-technical people coupled with the interim hit on productivity is larger than you think. These costs are potentially inflated by CYA attitudes, but they are real.