Discover our mission

The idea is pretty simple and straight forward: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support basic web standards, and should be phased out. This isn’t about being anti-Microsoft, it’s about pushing people to move to more modern browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. IE6 accounts for around 20% of web usage, primarily business users. Clients pressure us to ’force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money on top of being extremely frustrating. While Microsoft is encouraging companies and developers to move on from IE6, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on and bring this baby down.

We’re not alone in our quest: Check out .net magazines web page: http://www.bringdownie6.com/

There are quite a few youtubeing, googleing, facebooking consumers still out there running IE6. If you are one of them, consider upgrading to to a newer browser. For one, its time to move on. We are now up to IE8, lets use it. Upgrading will give you a better user experience and allow you to view the newer technology that has been created to make browsing the web better. Designers can continue to improve the aesthetics of the web and bring eye catching designs to the web. I could go into detail about the issues and bore you with a bunch of verbiage that doesn’t make any sense to you or I could just point you in the right direction.

If you are considering updating to a new browser, here are some recommended browsers?

In conclusion, the quicker IE6 can go away the better off the internet will be. What are your views?

It is the default browser shipped with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, and was also made available for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows 2000. IE6 SP1 is the last version of Internet Explorer available for Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows 2000. Although IE6 has now been superseded by newer versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft still supports it in Windows 2000 SP4 and Windows XP SP3.

This version of Internet Explorer is widely derided for its security issues and lack of support for modern web standards, making frequent appearances in “worst tech products of all time” lists, with some publications labeling it as the “least secure software on the planet.”^[2] Campaigns have been established to encourage users to upgrade to newer versions of Internet Explorer or switch to different browsers, and some websites have dropped support for IE6 entirely most notable of which is Google’s drop of support.^[3][4]

Security Issues:

The security advisory site Secunia reported an outstanding 24 unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6 as of February 9, 2010. These vulnerabilities, which include several “moderately critical” ratings, amount to 17% of the total 144 security risks listed on the website as of February 11, 2010.^[9]

Although security patches continue to be released for a range of platforms, most recent feature additions and security improvements were released for Windows XP only.

As of June 23, 2006, Secunia counted 20 unpatched security flaws for Internet Explorer 6, many more and older than for any other browser, even in each individual criticality-level, although some of these flaws only affect Internet Explorer when running on certain versions of Windows or when running in conjunction with certain other applications.^[9]

On June 23, 2004, an attacker used two previously undiscovered security holes in Internet Explorer to insert spam-sending software on an unknown number of end-user computers.^[10] This malware became known as Download.ject and it caused users to infect their computers with a back door and key logger merely by viewing a web page. Infected sites included several financial sites.

Probably the biggest generic security failing of Internet Explorer (and other web browsers too) is the fact that it runs with the same level of access as the logged in user, rather than adopting the principle of least user access. Consequently any malware executing in the Internet Explorer process via a security vulnerability (e.g. Download.ject in the example above) has the same level of access as the user, something that has particular relevance when that user is an Administrator. Tools such as DropMyRights are able to address this issue by restricting the security token of the Internet Explorer process to that of a limited user. However this added level of security is not installed or available by default, and does not offer a simple way to elevate privileges ad-hoc when required (for example to access Microsoft Update).

Art Manion, a representative of the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team(US-CERT) noted in a vulnerability report that the design of Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 made it difficult to secure. He stated that:

There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, local file system (Local Machine Zone) trust, the Dynamic HTML (DHTML) document object model (in particular, proprietary DHTML features), the HTML Help system, MIME type determination, the graphical user interface (GUI), and ActiveX. … IE is integrated into Windows to such an extent that vulnerabilities in IE frequently provide an attacker significant access to the operating system.^[11]

Manion later clarified that most of these concerns were addressed in 2004 with the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2, and other browsers have now begun to suffer the same vulnerabilities he identified in the above CERT report.^[12]

Many security analysts^[who?] attribute Internet Explorer’s frequency of exploitation in part to its ubiquity, since its market dominance makes it the most obvious target. However, some critics^[who?] argue that this is not the full story, noting that Apache HTTP Server, for example, had a much larger market share than Microsoft IIS, yet Apache had traditionally had fewer (and generally less serious) security vulnerabilities than IIS, at the time.^[13]

As a result of its many problems, some security experts, including Bruce Schneier, recommend that users stop using Internet Explorer for normal browsing, and switch to a different browser instead.^[14] Several notable technology columnists have suggested the same, including The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg,^[15] and eWeek’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols.^[16] On July 6, 2004, US-CERT released an exploit report in which the last of seven workarounds was to use a different browser, especially when visiting untrusted sites.^[17]