Links:

• YouTube Drops IE6 Support on March 13th
• IE6 No More
• It’s Time to Finally Drop Internet Explorer 6
• Apple’s MobileMe drops support for IE 6
• More…

It is a matter of fact that Internet Explorer [IE] 6 does not support web standards and modern technologies.

These web standards and modern technologies have been developed to easily build web sites and to provide a better web navigation and experience to any internet user.

Unfortunately, web developers have to use obsolete and unnecessarily complex techniques to ensure their pages would render properly in IE.

In other words, IE6 downgrades the internet.

Who still uses IE6 and why?

Mostly companies running their PCs on Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Windows 2000 can run any version of Internet Explorer up to 6, while Windows XP can run any version of Internet Explorer up to 8.

Most of the companies still uses IE6 because they built applications and software running on Microsoft APIs belonging to IE6, and if they update to a newer version of Internet Explorer, their applications and software will stop working or become buggy.

Good practice when building any application or software is to make it platform independent, so that it can run on any operating system, does not depend on any third party software to work, and it makes future upgrades easier.
A good example of a platform independent software is Java.

YouTube and its parent company Google have chosen to phase out support for IE6 after the attack from hackers in China to their platforms.

Digg has been the first web firm to announce their phasing out support for IE6.