One of the most popular web browsers on the Internet is still Internet Explorer 6, almost 9 years after it's release. The most resent news about IE6 was that a bug in it helped hackers to gain access to  Googles network.

The special thing with IE6 is that it's not following normal Internet standards which means that a page that may look perfectly OK in Firefox or in Chrome may look completely damaged in IE6. So the question is are you still making sure your site is working in IE6? Or do you just satisfy with Firefox, Chrome and maybe IE7 or 8?

A quick look in the statistics for xaviermedia.com for January 2010 shows that IE is the second most used browser on our site (with about 25% of the total number) and IE6 is 30% of that. So IE6 is still kind of big even at this site.

Even the older IE5 and IE4 are used by our visitors. In a much smaller amount that IE6 of course, but it shows that people aren't that good at upgrading their web browsers.

For a developers point of view it's really annoying that people can't upgrade because you need to check your sites and blogs with old browsers that are full with bugs and security issues. But for the visitors point of view it's just stupid to keep an old broswer since it's so much easier for hackers and other evil persons to take control over your computer. In best case your computer just starts sending spam if you have an old browser, but in worst case you could end up having personal details like passwords and credit card numbers stolen.

Google has decided to take action against the old IE6, so as of March 1st you may get problems accessing Google Docs and Google Sites using IE6 and later this year they will also remove support for IE6 for Gmail too. Read more in their blog.

So back to the question, are you still developing for IE6? If you answer yes to this question you should have a look at the web site IE6 no more.com.

You may also be interested in...
Internet Explorer under attack
New bug in Internet Explorer
Web browser election in Europe

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Antivirus & Security, Blogging, Statistics, The World According to Xavier, Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.