Yahoo Joins the Upgrade IE6 Bandwagon
Yahoo, the fourth most visited site on the Internet, has announced it will drop support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 browser, an old version of the Web browser.
Yahoo is late to the farewell party for IE6: early this year, Google announced its withdrawal of IE6 support following a security breach in IE6 that led to infiltration into its stored data. Facebook followed suit in August 2010.
While most users aren't looking for ways to guard against corporate espionage, the Web poses threats to the security of their computers. Just a visit to a malicious website could mean a malware attack on a computer leading to stolen personal information or a computer that no longer works.
Microsoft has been urging its IE users to upgrade to IE8 for nearly a year. While its reasons include some fancy capabilities such as Web Slices , the real draw is security. Internet Explorer 8 is the top ranked browser in malware and phishing protection and has blocked over one billion attempts to download malware since its release in March of 2009, according to Microsoft.
Yahoo announced its decision to web developers so that they could build and optimize their sites accordingly. As for users who cling to IE6 ― 15 percent of the Internet population, says NetShare ―they won't see broken Yahoo sites, but some functions may not work. Yahoo says the change will take effect in the first quarter of 2011.
