The worst virus of Internet: Internet Explorer 6

IE6 suffers of big security holes, standard supports and has a performance quite slow. But the fact of IE6 allows that someone could steal us the password of the bank or see our inbox of Gmail, is not what bothers me most. What irritates me most is the terrible support of the standards of this browser, that makes an authentic nightmare develop compatible pages with it.

Microsoft always has been backward of others browsers in the standard support. In the epoch of IE6, this was a form of abuse of its dominant position, because then only you had three options when you were going to develop a web project:

1.- Develop the page for IE6 that has a 90% of market share, and forget you of make it work for the rest of browsers.

2.- Make a good develop meeting the standards, of this way, worked to almost all browser less for IE6.

3.- Develop practically the entire page two times, one for IE6 and other for the rest.

Often, due a lack of time, the preferred option was the first, giving to the user the false sensation of that IE6 works better than the rest of the browsers, when really it was this the one that was breaching of the standards. But this indirect way of abuse of its dominant position luckily was ended.

Actually, Internet Explorer in all its versions (according to Net Market Share), has a 60,74% of market share.

This decrease of the market share has been due to the appears of other browser like Firefox, Chrome or Safari that have been gaining ground, with better support of the standards, security, functionalities and performance.

Thanks to this, Microsoft has learned the lesson and from the version 8 of Internet Explorer we can enjoy of a proper support of the standards. Also, this has been made that Microsoft update his browser more frequently. The time passed between the IE6 and IE7 was 5 years, from the 2001 to the 2006, instead, IE8 appears in March of the 2009 and the next IE9 will appear the next 15 of September of the 2010. This new version will come with complete support of CSS3, HTML5 and SVG, something necessary, because this, others browsers already do it.

Likewise, the web development tool of Microsoft, ASP .NET, the code generated automatically has improved the standards support, less in a few situations.

These are the statistics of use of the browser at the date of today:

26,87 % Internet Explorer 8.0

16,97 % Internet Explorer 6.0

16,16 % Firefox 3.6

11.43 % Internet Explorer 7.0

6.48 % Chrome 5.0

22.09 % The rest

As you can observe despite the efforts of all the enterprises to avoid that anyone use IE6, regrettably, there are quite people that still follow using it due to the fact that this browser comes by default at the operating system of Microsoft more extended, Windows XP, with a 61,87% of market share.

I like contribute to the extinction of IE6 and the proliferation of free alternatives as Firefox. For that reason, in Computable Minds, the following message is showed when someone connects to it with IE6:"Your browser is more obsolete than the perforate cards, by the way you neither view correctly this page nor a lot of others. What are you waiting for? let's go!, update now!, If you don't know how, let's try to download Firefox it's free in all its meanings."