It's time to say goodbye to Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)

First it was the Germans, then the French and now even Microsoft themselves have had a go at their own browser and recommended you get yourself something better for browsing the internet!

What's Occurring?

Internet Explorer, specifically IE6, is under fire because of a critical vulnerability was implicated for the attack on Google's infrastructure by Chinese Hackers. Based on analysis by security firm McAffee their explanation was:

“As with most targeted attacks, the intruders gained access to an organization by sending a tailored attack to one or a few targeted individuals. We suspect these individuals were targeted because they likely had access to valuable intellectual property. These attacks will look like they come from a trusted source, leading the target to fall for the trap and clicking a link or file. That’s when the exploitation takes place, using the vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Once the malware is downloaded and installed, it opens a back door that allows the attacker to perform reconnaissance and gain complete control over the compromised system. The attacker can now identify high value targets and start to siphon off valuable data from the company.”

The Microsoft Security Research & Defence Blog address the issue in a recent blog article. The most important part of the post was that they “recommend users of IE6 on Windows XP upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and/or enable DEP.”  If you think of the announcement like a product recall: would you keep driving your car if the manufacturer announced the wheels are going to fall off? Don’t make the same mistake with your computer’s security.

What does this mean?

While people slating IE6 is nothing new, last week's events give new ammunition to people who advocate the abolition of IE6 - Creative Hub included! Here at Creative Hub we are quite vocal about our dislike for the antiquated, web standards breaking, frustrating and time consuming browser that is IE6. We stopped supporting IE6 early last year and joined IE6 No More, a group of web designers and social media websites trying to get people to upgrade to a newer or completely different browser. This allows us to keep costs down and use modern techniques and technologies like our Magento ecommerce shopping cart.

On the horizon is the exciting (well for us anyway) HTML 5 which allows animation, video, audio, geolocation and much more to be rendered without plugins like Flash, Windows Media or Quicktime. While old browsers will still work with websites in HTML 5, they will simply not get anywhere near the same functionality.

With more and more companies like Digg, Facebook and soon YouTube dropping support for IE6, its users are going to be left out. IE6 was good enough for use in 2001, but for the internet and websites to evolve we must look forward and IE6 must go away as a browser.