For years, Internet Explorer 6 has been the butt of many jokes. To Econsultancy, a UK-based marketing association, “IE6 may be the worst web browser ever created.”
The browser has been chided by web designers and developers for it’s complete lack of web standards and it’s blatant security issues.
Now, that web browser, which was the default portal to the Internet for the majority of Windows XP users, is clearly and nearly almost dead–with market share below 1% in the most important Internet market. Microsoft, itself, has created a website to help accelerate the demise of IE6. The IE6 Countdown site was launched last March. Besides the US catching up to Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway as having the browser used by less than 1%, a new fleet of countries will be joining these celebrated ranks. In Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal and the Philippines, IE6 will soon seen less than 1% usage as well.
It will be a great moment when IT professionals and web developers can stop fussing over that pain-in-the-ass browser and focus their time on building better and more exciting applications.
For more than a decade, Internet Explorer has claimed more than 50% of the Internet’s traffic. For the first time, Internet Explorer’s web traffic fell below 50% in October 2011.
Mozilla has released Firefox 7 web browser, which promises to be speedier than previous versions. This is great news for most all web users, as websites demand more from their browsers. The significant speed boosts will certainly be felt by those that leave a lot of tabs open or leave their browser running for extended periods of time. Supposedly, the new version of the web browser offers a 50 percent reduction in memory use. This is a critical focus of Mozilla, as many users are attracted to Google’s Chrome for it’s simplicity and fantastic speed.
