Have you updated your browser lately? August 3rd, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Last month techzoom.net posted a publication outlining the not so surprising small number of people using out of date browsers. According to the publication %40 of internet users are using outdated browsers.
If your running an outdated version of your browser you are putting your computer at a drastically increased risk being infected or losing data from a virus or worm. The biggest culprit by far is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). There are few legitimate reasons why you should be running this version of IE. The biggest would be the company you work for has not upgraded their browsers.
There is also a new trend in the development world to stop creating websites and applications that run in outdated browsers. A year ago the first sign of a poorly developed website was a flash splash screen followed by, “best viewed in Internet Explorer at XXX resolution”. A well thought out and developed web site could be viewed the same in any resolution regardless of browser. I have spent countless hours wrestling Internet Explorer’s quirks when it comes to rendering sites.
I believe that a portion of blame for users with outdated browsers should be laid on the development/design community for catering to these particular visitors. But really did we have a choice? Depending on the website there might as much as %15 of total traffic deriving from IE6. Choosing to alienate %15 of your visitors is not an option. Over the course of the last few months Firefox has taken up a larger portion of the market and IE6 has decreased significantly. This is probably due to a couple of factors. First IE7 is now available to all windows users (even those who have not verified they have a legitimate copy). Secondly the huge marketing push for Firefox 3.
The days of developing websites that render correctly in IE6 are over for me. I use and recommend Firefox. And now to be responsible here are the links.
Internet Explorer 7
Firefox (Windows 2k? No problem you can run Firefox 2)
Opera