Internet Explorer 6 is now 10 years old and 3 versions behind with IE7 and IE8 being the dominant browsers at the moment from Microsoft. There has been a lot of adverse publicity surrounding IE6 over the last few days and people have been saying for a long time that IE6 should not be supported.  Even Microsoft themselves no longer support IE6 with updates or security patches.

We have always tried to make our websites as cross-browser friendly as possible but the time has come for us to support the general line that's being given by the industry.

As well as being a security nightmare for users - something that doesn't really affect us - it's also a complete nightmare for us as developers.  IE6 never supported standards based web design and we always had to put little hacks in to make sure that code would work for it. If we followed the W3C guidelines to the letter and produced 100% compliant code, it would always break in IE6.  It was the case that we actually had to write bad code in order to support IE6.  IE7 and 8 are much more standards based now and make use of the latest standards and technologies. This gives us much more scope to create feature rich websites that will give a better experience for your visitors.

Insight have now taken the decision to drop support for IE6.  It is dropping fast when we look through the stats for all the sites we support and the latest publicity will speed the process up. By joining the masses and dropping support for it we're contributing to a much safer internet for everyone.

If you use it yourself then you MUST upgrade. You are compromising the security of your own computer and any that are in your company network. Think about it: if these people that exploit its vulnerabilities to the extent that they can hack into the likes of Google then they'll have control of your machine and be sending out spam in a heartbeat.

Our reccommendation would be to get Firefox. It's a much more stable browser and a real joy to use.