Microsoft Finally Says Goodbye to IE 6 in the U.S.
There's a good chance Microsoft as a whole is popping open the champagne bottles and tooting leftover New Year's Day horns, as the company has finally succeeded in pushing the masses into ditching Internet Explorer 6.
The company has for years literally begged consumers to update older versions of Internet Explorer, warning that it would reduce the (high) risk of acquiring viruses and other malicious malware. The company even just recently introduced a feature in Windows Update that will automatically update Internet Explorer, seemingly pushing users into staying current rather than ignoring browser revisions and risking infection.
But now the company employees are seemingly dancing in the streets, as the official U.S.-based Internet Explorer 6 numbers have rolled in, and they report well below 1-percent. Worldwide, the number still hovers just below 8-percent as of December 2011, with China serving as the biggest IE6 offender followed by South Korea and Japan. Norway has the least number of IE6 users followed by Finland and the United States.
For the record, Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421 is the latest official release from Microsoft as of this writing.
"IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away," writes Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing. "In fact, we launched the IE6 Countdown site last March to help accelerate the process. Less than a year later, I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1-percent usage of IE6."
"In addition, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal and the Philippines are also entering the Champions’ Circle," he added. "We hope this means more developers and IT Pros can consider IE6 a “low-priority” at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser."
Consumers still using Internet Explorer 7 or older should head here and install the latest version. Features include support for HTML5, hardware acceleration, a faster start-up time and more. It will be like a brand new internet!
And yes, today IS "obvious day".
This would be fun to see.
Every time a Chrome developer sneezes they increment the main version number. Firefox felt left behind so recently they've been on the same path. I didn't see what was so wrong with Firefox's old versioning system, myself.
Anyway, there isn't much of a need to update from IE6 since IE6 works just fine for downloading firefox or google chrome
And yes, today IS "obvious day".
IE9 isnt perfect but in the browser benchmarks it is going toe-totoe with Chrome and Firefox
The fact is it wins some important browser metrics
Has some of the fastest page load times
Some people here better read the browser bench articles that Toms puts out
IE9 aint your Grandma's IE anymore
It is sleek and has a great GUI
It is behind just a lttle in HTML5 standards but has improved drastically even in that department
Dont get me wrong
I love Firefox also
I do something silly and have BOTH installed
I use IE9 for general browing of my everyday websites and then I use FF with NoScript,ADBlock and other security plugins along with PeerBlock ISP blocking software for when I venture out to unsafer parts of the web.
I might even install Chrome to check it out since I have seen some good benches with Chrome
What I am saying is
Your browser is not your girlfriend
There is no reason to get emotionally involved
There is no reason you can't use more than one
It is not cheating
you know if the change of browser so much that extensions become unusable because of the change, I believe that warrants a full version upgrade not just a .XX increase.
They can implement more stuff into the browser faster this way and it's not a complete pain in the butt to look up extensions and see if they work for your browser.
For the life of me I cannot see why people have such a problem with chrome and Firefox increasing their version numbers. Chrome I don't get why does that, but Firefox does that now and every version number breaks an extension, I prefer Firefox increase the version number opposed to a .XX increase if it's going to break an extension.
in the GUI department I think that Internet Explorer 9 is crap, I preferred 8 user interface to 9 easily, best that I generally take the minimalist, and Internet Explorer is even more minimalist than chrome.
Chrome does not do WIN2k !
Microsoft fudged themselves into this hole by making IE6 a hard wired part of the OS.
Got them into all sorts of trouble and now, that you can not uninstall and replace the thing all the Win98/Win2K machines switch to Opera, Firefox etc. There goes the market share.
I know, all gaming kids now cry out Win2K... get with the times... but Corporate America still uses boatloads of the older OS, they don't play high end games in the office, just Word processing and Excel. It is one thing to upgrade your gaming rig, and another to update thousands of PCs in a corporate environment.
Just the cost of retraining all those employees costs a fortune. And in these times nobody has money to burn. Hopefully M$ learned a lesson or two from this; also I doubt it.
have you ever seen Japan Korea or China's Internet?
The webpages look like old HTML abortions, I mean seriously think of really really really old Yahoo and that's what almost every website looks like. There are few exceptions, but the user interface for everything over there is just crap, when you take that into consideration you can see how Internet Explorer 6 lasted so damn long