Glenn Flieshman writing for Six Colors comments:
In March 2012, Microsoft baked a cake for IE6: not to celebrate an anniversary, but cheer at its vastly shrunken marketshare. Arguably the worst version of IE that the company ever released, it remained in broad use many years after its introduction because it was part of Windows XP, which is both the most widely pirated and most heavily used legacy edition of the operating system.
But IE6 won’t die. In China, its usage still represents over 10 percent of web visits; in most other countries, it’s below one percent. Weighted by all desktop users, however, Microsoft (using Net Applications data) pegs IE as 3.8 percent of global use. With hundreds of millions of desktop computer users worldwide, this translates to tens of millions of IE 6 users.
In America, despite the very low usage rate of IE6, many companies have clung to Windows XP because they built in-house apps that continue to work and lack the budget, time, or potentially knowledge to upgrade without breaking them. Even though IE8 would be the correct choice for the last-patched version of XP, IE6 is the standard.
POODLE proved that older versions of SSL are vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that can be launched with today’s hardware. If one of a the casualties of that attack was the final death of Internet Explorer 6, then I can’t help but clap a little.
Read more at: The Untimely Death of IE6
