I've always wondered----why can't you just install two browsers?
The old IE6 browser that can run your ancient intranet apps, and the new Chrome that can run the new SaaS apps. The new one auto-updates, and the old one doesn't.
Clearly IT departments are capable of supporting multiple programs since that's what they do when someone purchases native software instead of a ASP app.
Most companies do. IE & Safari come with their respective OS, and if you're a Windows shop you're probably going to also install either Chrome or FF. We had been standardized on FF until they expedited their release cycle, which made keeping current too much work (this will change once it updates silently without breaking add-ons), but since we were a Google Apps shop anyway, this doubled our resolve to switch to Chrome. We kept FF around as a fallback in case we ran into situations where Chrome didn't work (Juniper SSLVPN meetings in Windows, for example). We actively try to prevent users from accessing IE (removed shortcuts from desktop & Start menu, etc), btw, except for the couple hundred users who actually need it to run legacy apps we have no control over.
Note: about 80% of our employees with computers don't have internet access at all, with the exception of a proxy rule that allows them to access Google Apps (and a few other select SAAS apps). You can imagine this complicates things a wee bit.
You can't run IE6 on a modern version of Windows. You can run it in a VM, which is Microsoft's "approved" approach (they provide old version of browsers for this kind of thing)
Most people don't understand the "old IE6 app" issue - it actually applies to a very, very small number of apps. It isn't that these apps don't display in other browsers because of bad HTML - it is because they use weird IE6 only technologies. Microsoft came up with some very strange things over the years (look at Data Islands: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms76...), and fixing these apps isn't just HTML tweaking. Of course, if you still have a Data Island app around these days your IT department should be fired...
The old IE6 browser that can run your ancient intranet apps, and the new Chrome that can run the new SaaS apps. The new one auto-updates, and the old one doesn't.
Clearly IT departments are capable of supporting multiple programs since that's what they do when someone purchases native software instead of a ASP app.