I don't like the blue cartoon theme that comes standard with XP, and use the classic theme, Windows-95 era.

IE8 fails on that theme, with large black areas where menus should be. Although IE8 has been out for a while now, MS chooses not to fix this bug.

In colombia SOuth America we are forced to use IE6 in business because the web sites for e-commerce and public sectors are locked in that version of IE. We can't use IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, chrome because those sites crashes/won't work.

@J
J, Firefox,Opera and so on will not make much headway into the corporate world till Mozilla,Opera etc pull their fingers out and supply ADM templates with their offerings.
Sure, there are ome third party ones of dubious quality, but until there is an "official" one they have ruled themselfs out of my corporate workspace and many others as well,

Microsoft have a complex end of life schedule for IE here:

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps/#Internet_Explorer

The latest date I can see is 13th July 2010 - shouldn't businesses be preparing to move to IE8 now there's just under 6 months to go before IE6 becomes officially unsupported?

Any bets MS just extends the EOL for IE6 by another 6 months though! After all, IE6 got extended in the past because XP was (due to an MS panic about Vista not working well on netbooks and MS worried Linux might get market traction on netbooks).

...love it.

btw in the land of korea, almost everyone use IE6 or that sorts because many big sites still rely heavily on activeX. most, if not all banks, governments and corporate websites do not even render properly under firefox.

me? i stay away from korean web and surf with either firefox or chrome.

chrome feels a lot faster and 'lighter', while it does have drawbacks of occasional crashing if i open too many tabs. firefox almost never crash but feels a bit slower than nimble new chrome.

IE6 is also the default version installed with XP. It was M$ choice to bundle their browser with the OS. How many technophobes are completely oblivious to this, and use what M$ has handed them and told them works?

Joe: Hey George, why is your company buying all those paper towel companies?

George: Well, you see, we bought these paper towel holders and these paper companies are the only ones that make the towels that fit in them.

Joe: Why not buy a different towel holders or upgrade your current ones?

George: Well, some of our towel holders were made special to fit just right.

Joe: I still think it would be cheaper to make a new towel holder in the long run.

George: Probably, but those IT guys need some job security.

I bought a perfectly good computer quite some time ago, and want to continue using it without sending Microsoft more money every month. Their planned obsolescence strategy is as bad as GM's was in the 1970s, and will give them the same result.

Where's my free upgrade to Windows 7?

Quite simple.

1) The are quite a few internal corporate web sites/intranets which were written specifically for IE6. As we all know IE6 was not standards based and as such you have compatabillity issues with IE7 and IE8 with those same sites.
2) It's the newest supported version of IE for Windows 2000

I have to deal with IE6 to get my expenses paid back. It's a nightmare. Most of the day: Linux and firefox. But have any travel expenses, virtualbox-hosted-win2k03 and IE6

Because there is no money to upgrade the expenses app, and IE6 may suck, but it's a stable suck.

When the company moves on, I hope they embrace firefox or chrome and not a future IE version. IE6 and outlook are the only reasons I keep a windows VM around.

MS created development tools that create IE6 only code, as part of there plan to take over the world.

People used them to create corporate apps.
It didn't seem like a big deal at the time as everyone used IE. Now they are stuck.

I found that if it didn't get members of the ID dept away on at least a weeks training it would never get approval.

http://www.mozilla.com

The solution to this is to let people use IE6 only for the support for those corporate apps.

Use Firefox surf the public internet and keep it updated. It's free, and all it requires is the IT department to approve it. Why they wouldn't since it will improve security is beyond me.

I agree with Olle P and the others.

A security update (patch) is much different than a version update. A security update usually addresses a single issue whereas a version update usually addresses many issues (including security) and also usually includes feature additions or changes.

While I do agree with you that a lot of people do not use security updates, a lot of people don't update the version of software they're using for various (good) reasons.

You obviously are no IT professional...
There are plenty of corporate applications that still require IE6 to function properly. For the companies running these apps they're crucial and therefore upgrading changing to some other browser is a non-starter.

you'll be suprised of how many computer networks that dont get updated still use such things like IE6. Some schools in the Uk still have Windows 2000 on them in my area and lack of funding wont let them upgrade.

Some people stick to IE6 because they like it if there was a % of who uses which version wonder how much use IE6 still has.

If people still use Windows 2000, IE 6 is the latest modern version of Internet Explorer that still runs. People on 2000 have no choice but to use it, or move to alternatives. Therefore Microsoft is doing a favor by releasing security updates for it; considering the fact that until October 2k is still supported.

Why bother sending out an update that no one is going to download and use anyway. Clearly if the user is using IE6 they are not updating their computer on any sort of regularity.

Because it's the newest version of IE that works with Windows 2000, an OS that a lot of businesses are still running.