That's one way Google will get to promote Chrome even further! Actually IE 6 has doa here since 7 was final!

It's actually hard to imagine people are still running ie6 as their default browser.

Do these folk live on the moon?

no they dot live on the moon, but for example, joe bloggs buys a pc with XP on it, it ships with IE6 to him that just internet explorer, he has no idea about versions and such, so he keeps using the same browser, because to him "hey the internets just the internet right?"

The, (other?), major reason for the continued use of older browser versions is in major corporations where internal software solutions are written to be totally dependent on a certain browser version.

There were a lot of changes under the hood, (for good valid reasons), between IE6 & IE7, which would mean re-writing this specialist software for the "new" browser, plus the need to re-train users, all this on top of the actual upgrade process - not an easy thing to do when you are dealing with many thousands of users and systems :)

for these corporations it can take moths to confirm that it is OK to accept a simple security upgrade and to roll this out across the whole organisation.

If you frequent the technical downloads areas of Microsoft sites you will often see optional group policy downloads to prevent the automatic downloads to user systems, of compulsory downloads that can be applied by the IT divisions of these corporations, this shows how much this is a serious issue

severedsolo said:

no they dot live on the moon, but for example, joe bloggs buys a pc with XP on it, it ships with IE6 to him that just internet explorer, he has no idea about versions and such, so he keeps using the same browser, because to him "hey the internets just the internet right?"

What? They still sell xp? Must be me on the moon

I have to agree with Barman58 on the corporate resistance to change. The one thing that may be a factor for things like that however is the new XP Mode seeing IE 8 there not the default browser originally shipped with the older version itself.

For versions older then XP IE 6 was the newest that would go on in those cases. IE 6 was simply the upgrade for 98, ME, 2000 over IE 5 and 5.5. IE 7 was only made available for XP since the others were no longer supported.

And for RST101's question on XP, Newegg.com - Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3 32-bit for System Builders - Operating Systems You won't find XP on many retail shelves however. Vista and 7 mainly 7 being the latest for most places.