14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft discontinued both Office 2003 and Windows XP on April 8 and, at the same time, also reminded users that Internet Explorer 6, which was launched nearly 13 years ago, no longer receives updates and security patches.
In other words, those still running this ancient version of Internet Explorer should either upgrade to a newer build or replace it with some other browser, such as Google Chrome or Firefox.
And still, not everyone is getting the right message, as stats posted on the IE6 Countdown page show that 4.2 percent of the desktop computers worldwide are still running it as we speak.
China is the country that has the biggest number of PCs with IE6, namely 22.2 percent, followed by Taiwan with 3.5 percent, India with 2.8 percent, and Japan with 1.7 percent. South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, New Zealand, Turkey, Brazil, and Canada are also among the countries where IE6 still survives.
“Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we're in 2014, in an era of modern web standards, it's time to say goodbye,” Microsoft says on the page.
Of course, Microsoft hopes that Internet Explorer 6 users will upgrade to another version of the browser rather than replace it with an alternative app, but an old computer can only go as high as Internet Explorer 8, which was, in its turn, abandoned by the software giant on April 8.