The two classic browser versions from Microsoft are soon set to sail into the west. Over the past few months, Redmond made its intentions of retiring Internet Explorer 6 very clear.
The software titan recently launched a countdown website for IE 6.
Regardless of the company’s efforts, both Internet Explorer 6 and 7 still remain remarkable popular the world over, even though the former of the two was launched more than 11 years back together with the classic Windows XP operating system.
While Microsoft may be struggling to move onto newer version of Internet Explorer, that is not stopping from other online services to drop support for these two versions — quite in line with their declining market shares.
Twitter, is one such online service.
The social network announced that it will no longer support IE6 and IE7 from May 13, 2013 onwards, because usage has dwindled significantly over the past few years as users have moved to more modern browsers.
Sounds about fair — but try telling this to the user base of these two browsers.
Internet Explorer 7, the social network said, would still work for a while. But all external widgets will cease to render in Internet Explorer 6. And all features will eventually stop functioning on both browsers later down the road.
As you may recall, Internet Explorer 6 still commands a shockingly outrageous market share, with the latest Net Applications data revealing that it is currently the fifth most popular browser in the world. IE6 is installed on no less than 6 percent of computers the world over.
Internet Explorer 10, for comparison’s sake, only finds itself on 2.93 percent of PCs worldwide.
