Together with the launch of its interactive ‘Internet Explorer 6 Countdown’ website, Microsoft announced its dedication to kill off IE6 in a blog post last Friday. The IE6 countdown campaign aims to reduce the proportion of Internet users using IE6 and urges users to adopt a modern browser. Asia is the main culprit contributing a huge proportion of IE6 users, especially from China.
More than 34 percent of Internet users in China still use IE6, according to the Microsoft’s statistics. That is equivalent to about 155 million IE6 users from China (out of a total 457 million Internet users). Surprisingly, South Korea is the second largest IE6 contributors at 24 percent (9.5 million IE6 users). Other Asian countries with significant proportion of IE6 users include Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand.
“10 years on from the launch of IE6, this site is dedicated to watching IE6 usage drop below 1% worldwide. C’mon IE6, it’s time for a modern web so nice knowing you and all that but….buhbye!” – said Microsoft’s Steve Clayton.
“… It’s (IE6) clearly one of the biggest hurdles they (web developers) face in their work and in helping us all move to the beautiful new world of HTML5,” he added.
So why is Microsoft abandoning IE6? Security is the top reason. IE6 is probably the least secured browser in the planet. IE6 also lacks a whole load of features such as privacy browsing, multi-tabs and web slices. Microsoft urges current IE6 users to upgrade to IE9. Alternatively, there are also other browsers like Google Chrome, Safari and Opera for better web browsing experience.
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