Application limitations and slow rate of change adoption. Although some of the challenges the Internet faces can be partially addressed by changes to protocols and/or client software, history shows that these are all slow to change. While enterprises want to provide the best performance to their end users, they often have little or no control over the end users software. While the benefits of some protocol changes can be seen as soon as some clients and servers adopt them, other proposed changes can be infeasible to implement as they require close to 100% client adoption to avoid breaking older clients. Most enterprises would also prefer to not to have to keep up with adapting their web infrastructure to tune performance of all of the heterogeneous client software in-use. For example, Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer 6 (which has considerably slower performance than later versions and doesn‘t work reliably with protocol optimizations such as gzip compression) was still one of the most popular browsers in use in December 2009, despite being introduced more than eight years prior [29].
