Internet Dumper

Time flies fast, and new browsers replace old ones. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and, of course, even Internet Explorer have been upgraded and updated countless times in the last couple of years.
All of this makes it easy to forget what browser is still dominating the market. According to Net Application’s Market Share data, that browser is Internet Explorer 6, released in August 2001.
How can this be? With all the recent campaigns against Internet Explorer, people should be ditching it fast, right?
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Compared to August, IE6 has lost only 0.8% of its market share, dropping to 24.4%, which still makes it by far the most popular web browser, in front of Internet Explorer 7.0 with 19.39%, Internet Explorer 8.0 with 16.84%, Firefox 3.5 with 12.65%, and Firefox 3.0 which holds 9.62% of the market.
There’s no two ways about it: by today’s standards, IE6 is a nightmare. It’s poorly supported, its security is lacking, it doesn’t support PNG transparency, CSS v2, HTML5; in short, with all the free alternatives, no one should be browsing with IE6, period.
Unfortunately, it seems that old habits die hard; when it comes to web browsers, many users simply don’t want to switch to anything new, even if it’s vastly better. The migration to the upcoming Windows 7 (which come with the latest version of IE) OS will help at least part of the user base switch to a better browser; let’s hope the rest notices that the world has moved on, and it’s time to let go of IE6.