MS love IE6.
Anyone who has used a computer in recent years will have run into Internet Explorer at some point, the more ubiquitous of which is Internet Explorer 6, and recently declared by YouTube to be a waste of time.
It came packed in with Windows XP, and at the height of its reign was the most widely-used web browser out there, topping the list long before Mozilla's Firefox and other open-source browsers came around.
It also managed to piss off more web developers and sysadmins than any other, being so full of security holes and poor standards support that it was a bloody chore to work with.
What was made even worse was the fact that Microsoft would often leave those holes unpatched for significant lengths of time, meaning that viruses had an easy foot in the door.
Headaches with poor CSS support and other essential features caused outrage in the coding community, causing sites such as Why IE Sucks, Facebook IE6 hating groups, Bring Down IE6 and the ever-amusing (NSFW) message from Joe about his particularly strong hate of IE6.
But through all that hate and angst, Microsoft have released a blog post saying that they're not only going to keep supporting the aging browser, but consider it essential to do so.
They claim that it's not the responsibility of each user to upgrade their system, but rather the person responsible for it, and therefore they have to keep supporting it 'till Windows XP hits end-of-life:
Many PCs don't belong to individual enthusiasts, but to organizations. The people in these organizations responsible for these machines decide what to do with them. These people are professionally responsible for keeping tens or hundreds or thousands of PCs working on budget. The backdrop might be a factory floor or hospital ward or school lab or government organization, each with its own business applications.
While this might be fair enough, it's silly to glaze over the issues that plague the browser - something that a simple auto-update to IE7 or later could help overcome.
Head over to the Microsoft blog post for more, and post below with your opinion of IE6 - should it live, or be killed off?
Issue: 133 | February, 2012