As a web designer, nothing was a source of more ire in my life than IE6. I’m glad its going the way of the dodo.
With the recent decision by Youtube to no longer support IE6 (lead by their parent company Google earlier) one more nail has been pounded into IE 6′s coffin. The reason for this shift is mainly that Microsoft is no longer supporting the browser. What that means to the average user is that any existing and future security flaws in the browser will not corrected.
Internet Explorer 6 was found to be the cause of the recent hack of Google and other companies. The browser carries a major security flaw that allows hackers access to your PC. Unauthorized access to PC’s through back doors to steal passwords, credit card information, and to set up bot-nets. Bot-nets are clusters of infected PC’s that a hacker can use to target other websites on the internet.
The browser had some serious flaws when it came to dealing with the css box model that has been adopted as the standard for web design. This caused developers countless hours of programming to make sure sites conformed to IE6 and not to the web standard. Less than affectionately known as ‘Internet Exploder”.
The future of web design is the coming in the form of HTML 5 and CSS 3. These programs will do some amazing things, integrated video tag that play movies, fluid css driven animation(only visible in Chrome or Safari), among others. However to take advantage of the future of the internet, we must leave the old behind.
If you’re unsure of what version of IE you have go here to get the latest version, or better yet get Firefox, or Chrome, or Safari.
