IE6 Gets the Boot

In 2006, five years after its launch, Internet Explorer 6 came in 8^th in PC World’s Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. Now, the same browser is known for its terrible susceptibility to hackers and viruses that has become evident over the past nine years.

Even though IE7 and IE8 have both been launched, IE6 still has a pretty large following. A well known site that uncovers interesting stories on the internet, called Digg, claims that about 10% of traffic to their site is from Internet Explorer 6. That is a remarkable percentage when considering that Digg had over 38 million visitors to their site in June alone. Even though Digg reports so much traffic from IE6, they also report that only 1% of comments are left by IE6 users. Therefore Digg is considering removing some of their key features for IE6 users, like commenting and digging.

Digg isn’t the only site considering to move away from the parasite if IE6. YouTube is now taking steps to decrease visitors from IE6. If you currently have IE6 as your browser and you visit the YouTube site, you will see a blue bar at the top of the home page saying that you should upgrade to a newer browser. It also informs you that YouTube will be phasing out their support of your browser soon so you need to download Google Chrome, IE8, or Firefox 3.5. Google is using this “phasing out” announcement to really promote Google Chrome. On every page you visit on the YouTube site (almost every page) there is a link to download Google Chrome in some advertisement.

With the latest data from StatCounter, Internet Explorer lost 11.4% of the market share to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari since March. If Microsoft had a face, it would be starting to sweat in this heat.