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[Keith Williams]

Google, having been hacked by the Chinese who exploited a flaw in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), have now announced that they will no longer support this 9-year-old web browser. The governments of Germany and France have advised their citizens to stop using it too, and UK government departments (in particular the NHS) are being urged to upgrade.

As I said in my previous post, IE6 is old, insecure and frankly a pain in the backside for web developers and cloud providers alike. Our figures from Clouds UK and this forum show a persistent 15-20% of users remain on Internet Explorer, and this tallies with general usage figures. Whilst Clouds UK will continue to support IE6 for the forseeable future, we strongly advise our customers to upgrade either to a later version of Internet Explorer (7 or , or one of the freely-available alternatives such as Firefox (which is also fully supported by Clouds UK).

[Chris]

Been using Firefox for years now, and with Google Chrome there is no reason to use IE at all these`days. A techie told me using IE is not just like leaving your back door open for security reasons,its  more like not having a back door on at all  

[Keith Williams]

That's a good analogy! Although in fairness, IE8 is decent enough for security, especially on Windows 7. The main issue is that the technology behind the web is moving forward in exciting directions, and IE seems to take about 10 years to adopt any of the new standards whilst Firefox, Opera and the like adopt them straight away. When IE does implement a new standard, it usually does it differently to the others, and so web design ends up being like chasing the bubbles out of wallpaper - squash one, and another one pops up somewhere else.

Thankfully the users of this forum are pretty good, on the whole - we're at around 40% Firefox usage, with IE6 in a dwindling 15%.

The problem mainly comes from big companies who have standardised on IE6, whose internal systems are all designed for IE6, and who take decades to change. With any luck this recent spate of security warnings might finally wake up their CEOs, CIOs and CTOs to the dangers of IE6 and they might start telling their techies to begin upgrading...