Microsoft has made a very strange announcement recently. The company said it would support its almost-ten-year-old internet browser, Internet Explorer 6 until 2014. MS was attacked by many people right away saying they should simply just get rid of the old version of IE as it only “slows down the online experience”. Well, it is not enough to tell this to Microsoft – according to some official survey data 15-20% of computer users still use IE 6 for surfing the internet even though the latest version – Internet Explorer 8 – was released this spring.

Some went as far to form a group so that they could jointly fight against the good-old IE 6. But what exactly is wrong with IE 6? First of all, it is very slow compared to the latest release of the software and its main competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Opera and Apple’s Safari. It is not very secure, either, and it misses plenty of those features that made its competitors successful, such as extensions and themes that can be added, tabbed-browsing, etc.

However, for a company investing into the new version of IE still takes a lot of effort and money instead of keeping and debugging the old platform. Yet, web designers and programmers hate IE 6 as the web applications and websites they are working on require an extra time so that it can be compatible with IE 6. Whenever new features are to be introduced IE 6 represents a barrier.

Meanwhile, alternative browsers pose a big threat to Microsoft’s IE. Mozilla’s Firefox comes as the 2nd biggest market share holder with its 22%. The company has recently announced that its browser had been downloaded by the billionth time. The figure was based on deliberate downloads – automatic updates were excluded. Beta version of the 3.6 version is already available and the 4th generation will probably be released very soon with some new, never-before-seen features.

Peter

Source: BBC

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