Microsoft Campaign to End Explorer 6

Microsoft Campaign to End Explorer 6 (8th March, 2011)

Microsoft has launched a website campaign asking people to stop using its 10-year-old Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) browser. Internet companies usually do their best to promote their products, but not so in Microsoft’s case. The software giant wants IE6 to be used by less than one per cent of the world’s internet users. It has launched a special website to encourage web users to discontinue with IE6 and switch to newer, more reliable and more secure versions, IE8 or IE9. Microsoft officials say its www.theie6countdown.com site is “designed to monitor progress of moving worldwide market share of IE6 to less than one per cent”. Microsoft’s IE6 browser has been criticized for its slow speed and poor security. The company spends a lot of money on making monthly security patches.

Despite being released in 2001, a large percentage of the world’s web users still use IE6. Microsoft states: “Currently one in four Internet Explorer users continue to use IE6, a browser which lacks modern web standards and provides an unsatisfactory user experience.” In China, 34.5 per cent of Internet surfers still use it. In Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Taiwan and India, the figure is above 10 per cent. The browser now represents bad publicity for Microsoft. It frequently appears in "the worst tech products of all time" lists, and PC World magazine labelled it as the "least secure software on the planet." Microsoft faces a lot of competition from other browsers. Google's Chrome is currently the world's fastest growing browser. Mozilla’s Firefox is used on 30 per cent of the world’s computers.