By David Fekke
January 17th, 2011
There have been a lot of posts on the interwebs this Summer on supporting Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Recently on the Digg blog there was a post from one of the engineers that they have very low usage from IE6 at this point, so they are dropping support.
Ina Fried also had a post on how Microsoft is having a hard time getting companies to upgrade to newer version of IE. I am currently building web applications for business users, and as much as I would like to stop supporting IE6 it still has a 40 percent market share in the financial sector.
A lot of the problem stems from the fact that most companies are deploying desktops with Windows XP and IE6. IE6 was released in 2001, and has really started to show its age. Some of the problems have been that it does not support W3C standards fully, poor CSS support, security bugs as well as Javascript interpreter bugs.
Even though IE7 and IE8 have improved on the standards and security, there are still major problems with the Javascript bugs.
Hopefully with Windows 7 coming out soon, more companies will start to upgrade their PCs with this new operating system.