ReadWriteWeb

Today the Internet bids another goodbye to Internet Explorer 6, whose U.S. death is inevitable. New data from Net Applications shows that less than 1% of U.S. Internet users choose IE6 as their browser of choice. And when it comes to the mobile/tablet browser market share, only 0.41% use some variation of Internet Explorer, period. iOS devices come with pre-installed Safari browsers, which make for 53.3% of the mobile browser market. Meanwhile, Opera Mini and an Android browser account for 21.66% and 15.87% of the mobile market, respectively.

Browser trends from Sitepoint showed some IE6 death signs just a month ago, noting that more people browsed the Web on their smartphones than used IE6 and IE7 combined.

After making the rounds on the Internet for a few days, a news story about research purporting to show that Internet Explorer users tend to have low IQ scores was revealed this morning to be a hoax. Evidently, the study, the press release and the supposed company that released it were all fake, a fact that, once revealed, forced dozens of news outlets who ran with it to concede that they were duped.

The hoax was perpetuated by an entrepreneur living in Canada named Tarandeep Singh Gill. He's the founder of a comparison shopping Website called AtCheap.com. In an email with ReadWriteWeb moments before he publicly revealed who he was, he told us that he hoped to lure a few people away from Internet Explorer, but he did not expect it to get the level of coverage that it did.

"I was really surprised that most media outlets fell for it," he said.

Dear Web developers: Microsoft knows how many hours of your life have been wasted trying to troubleshoot designs and functionality for Internet Explorer 6, and they're sorry. They promise they're never going to do that to you again.

To ensure such nightmares are never relived, the company will start rolling out automatic upgrades to Internet Explorer across Windows 7, Vista and XP, the company announced in a blog post today. Rather than relying on users to update the browser themselves or requiring you to trick your parents into updating theirs around the holidays, Windows will update to the latest compatible version of IE on its own.

This has been a rough year for Mozilla and its Firefox team. Once the darling of the Web and the champion of the oppressed against Microsoft and Internet Explorer, Firefox is facing stiff competition from its primary benefactor and backlash from users. Chrome also seems to be the preferred browser of Web developers. Naturally, this means speculation about the future of Firefox.

Has Firefox had better years? Absolutely. Does this mean that Firefox is "doomed"? Not so fast.

Somewhere along the line, Microsoft went from being the 800-pound gorilla in the browser market to begging users to switch back to Internet Explorer. Now, Microsoft is running a "where's the love?" campaign to offer "free stuff" for users who download IE9. After all these years, hasn't Microsoft learned yet that it can't buy love? Is the company capable of competing on features at all?

Microsoft launched a website today designed to give users a detailed look at how secure their browser is. The site, called Your Browser Matters, automatically detects the visitor's browser and returns a browser security score on a scale of four points.

Not suprisingly, Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 9 gets a perfect score. The latest stable releases of Firefox and Chrome, however, each score 2.5 and 2 points, respectively. Other browsers like Safari are not able to be analyzed by the site, which returns a message saying "We can't give you a score for your browser." Presumably, the domain yourbrowsermattersunlessyoureamacuser.com was too long to be marketable.

It's safe to say most Web developers would prefer not to support Internet Explorer 6. They'd rather put up a notice for the user to download another browser, or maybe just display the WAP-optimized version of the site instead.

But sometimes, it's not up to the developer to decide whether to support IE6. Your employer or client may require it. In a recent blog post Mike Davies reminds us that saving IE6 compatibility until the end of a project is a recipe for disaster. "If you leave IE6 testing and fixing to the end of your project, you have no-one else to blame for the pain but yourself," he concludes.

After making the rounds on the Internet for a few days, a news story about research purporting to show that Internet Explorer users tend to have low IQ scores was revealed this morning to be a hoax. Evidently, the study, the press release and the supposed company that released it were all fake, a fact that, once revealed, forced dozens of news outlets who ran with it to concede that they were duped.

The hoax was perpetuated by an entrepreneur living in Canada named Tarandeep Singh Gill. He's the founder of a comparison shopping Website called AtCheap.com. In an email with ReadWriteWeb moments before he publicly revealed who he was, he told us that he hoped to lure a few people away from Internet Explorer, but he did not expect it to get the level of coverage that it did.

"I was really surprised that most media outlets fell for it," he said.

According to a post on the Mozilla Add-Ons Blog, 85% of Firefox 4 users have at least one add-on installed. The average user has five add-ons installed. The figure doesn't include the Personas feature and excludes add-ons bundled with other software that users haven't actively chosen to install.

"We previously estimated that at least a third of Firefox users had chosen to install an add-on, but knew the number was higher than that," wrote Justin Scott, the product manager for add-ons at Mozilla.

The new version of the WordPress.com dashboard no longer supports Internet Explorer 6. "It has required increasingly complex code trickery to make the WordPress dashboard work in the IE6 browser, which was introduced 10 years ago and does not support current web standards.," WordPress UX Lead Jane Wells wrote in an announcement this week.

The beta release of WordPress 3.2 does not support IE6 either.