VB poll finds users still running outdated browser despite campaigns to boycott it.
Despite widespread calls to boycott
IE 6
and
Microsoft
‘s plans to retire support for the browser, 19% of respondents in a
Virus Bulletin
poll said that they are still running the browser, whether at home, at work, or both.
The browser has come in for heavy criticism due to numerous security flaws and its use of outdated technology. Indeed, in January both the French government and the German government issued advisories to computer users recommending that they switch to a different web browser, after it was discovered that
IE 6
contained a serious security flaw that could be exploited by hackers and cybercriminals.
Although the flaw in question was patched by
Microsoft
in late January (ahead of the company’s usual Patch Tuesday release for the month), support for the browser is already being phased out by Internet favourites such as
Google
,
YouTube
and
Facebook
, largely due to its lack of support for modern web standards.
In
VB
‘s poll, 15% of respondents said they were running the browser at work, indicating that, for many organizations, upgrading is not a priority – whether that is for reasons of compatibility with legacy applications or simply due to a lack of urgency in their IT departments. Campaigners who run the site
www.ie6nomore.com
hope that as corporate users find their browsing experience increasingly compromised by pages that fail to render properly in the aging browser, they will complain to their IT departments and put pressure on them to roll out an upgrade or install alternative browsers.
Some
VB
reader comments can be viewed
here
.
Posted on 23 February 2010 by
Virus Bulletin
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