IE6 is outdated. Fact.

Posted by: Nadia Owen, Business Communications 2 Feb 10 - 11:48AM | Search Marketing | Website Development | World Wide Web

IE6 is outdated. Fact.

We've played with IE7, and IE8 is now a few months old and even better than its predecessor. So it makes sense that IE6 gets buried in the Tomb of Old Technology alongside my old favourite, the floppy disk.

Interestingly, the plight of IE6 has now been escalated to Downing Street: a petition is now demanding that IE6 is dropped and they move to a more modern browser.

Continuing requirements to support such an old technology is seriously holding back innovation on the web, with IE6 supporting neither many newer web standards, nor many newer technological innovations.

The mentality of not upgrading is also helping to slow the widespread introduction of new web standards such as HTML5.

Many large corporations have often steadfastly refused to upgrade on the argument that why introduce risk by upgrading – the old “tried and tested, safe to stick with what you know” approach.

However, as the recent Google hacking issues have shown, this approach is actually counter-productive leading in fact to more weaknesses and vulnerabilities within a company’s infrastructure.

Technology is quite a fickle thing - IE6 was the most popular browser, and now it's popularity is fading fast: Net Applications says that IE6 has now been overtaken by IE8 as the most popular browser in terms of market share (IE6 now accounts for 20.07% of the browser market compared to IE8's 22.31%.)

And so we progress with new technologies improving on the old, so it's important to update, whether it's for security reasons or for ease-of-use. Read more about the pressure on IE6 at the BBC.