Goodbye IE6!! It’s been a long time coming, but usage of the long-outdated Internet Explorer 6 has finally dipped below 1% in the United States, earning the US a spot in the champions circle.
Microsoft started IE6Countdown.com in 2011 to raise awareness of the still-high usage of IE6 throughout the world and to inform people why this is such a bad thing. IE6 is chock-full of security holes and vulnerabilities because it’s been succeeded by IE7 (now IE8 and 9) so long ago that Microsoft has since quit updating it. And for good reason.
Not only does it have all these vulnerabilities and safety issues, IE6 was released over 10 years ago, so to say it’s also outdated and slow would be the understatement of the year. The amount of security enhancements and feature additions to Internet Explorer 7 put it leaps and bounds above IE6, not the least noticeable of which is the introduction of tabbed browsing to the Microsoft product. It also crushed a lot of bugs from IE6 and included much more support for Web standards. And yet, even IE7 is extremely outdated and cumbersome to code for. It came out in 2006, and was included with Windows Vista. Which is interesting because both IE7 and Vista are terrible pieces of software by today’s standards, so they fit well together. Then came IE8 in early 2009 with loads of security and usability improvements as well as much stricter compliance with Web standards. These were very welcomed changes indeed, and it was compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and 7, so it quickly became very widely used. Shortly after IE8 was released, however, HTML5 and CSS3 started to gain traction, so work on IE9 began and it was released just two years later. IE9 is much better as far as support for Web standards and new technology, but still leaves much to be desired. It is also unfortunate that IE9 does not run on Windows XP, so the latest version of IE that XP can run is 8. That’s why for XP users (and anyone else for that matter), we highly suggest running one of the many other very popular browsers that are much faster, more secure, and up to date (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera).
With IE10 already in development for over a year, its release date is coming soon, and it will not be available for Windows Vista users. This is all the more reason to try out one of the free browsers we mentioned above. Also with this knowledge, you can see why we were so strongly in favor of IE6Countdown.com and the idea behind it. With so many more browsers to choose from and so many IE updates since IE6, it’s just silly not to update. Although, most of the people that were using IE6 at that point (and for the few that are still on it today), the problem was/is much more likely that they’re unaware of all the changes or that they worked at a company that required them to stay on that version.
Update (6/2/12): The world’s usage of IE6 is now down to 6.3% as of May 30, 2012 and America’s usage is down to a measly .06%! And as Chrome and Firefox pump out updates on very frequent intervals (sometimes monthly), it seems likely that IE will follow suite, leading to a more consistently up-to-date browser.
