Microsoft → Adblock Plus discontinues support for IE6 and IE7

Discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 6 and 7
2014-04-29 16:59 by Wladimir Palant

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So far, Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer has been supporting every version Internet Explorer version still in use - including Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. This not only complicated development of Adblock Plus, our website and infrastructure had to support Internet Explorer 6 as well. This meant for example continuing to support the outdated SSLv3 protocol because the more secure TLS 1.0 protocol is turned off by default in Internet Explorer 6.

After reviewing the current market share of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 we've decided that we should stop supporting them.

What this means in particular:
• The next version of Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer will no longer install unless at least Internet Explorer 8 is present.
• We will start removing hacks that were required to make our website display correctly in Internet Explorer versions before Internet Explorer 8.
• SSLv3 protocol will be deactivated on our download servers, meaning that Internet Explorer 6 will not be able to connect unless TLS 1.0 is enabled manually.

In case you are interested, here are the statistics we looked at:
• It seems that less than 2% of all Internet Explorer users hitting our website or filter subscription servers are using Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7.
• Netmarketshare currently reports Internet Explorer 6 to have 4.15% market share world-wide and Internet Explorer 7 0.80%. These comparably high numbers are mostly due to a very high reported marked share of Internet Explorer 6 in China: currently 22.2%. The reported market share for pretty much every other country is below 2%.
• Baidu (the most popular search engine in China) disagrees and puts Internet Explorer 6 at 9.35% and Internet Explorer 7 at 2.99% in China — still a very high number but much more realistic.
• Other statistics services report significantly lower market share for outdated Internet Explorer versions: W3Counter reports 0.3% and 2.9% for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 respectively, StatCounter 0.28% and 0.46%.

In addition to these numbers it is important to note that even Windows XP users have the option to update to Internet Explorer 8 — and they should definitely do that.

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This meant for example continuing to support the outdated SSLv3 protocol because the more secure TLS 1.0 protocol is turned off by default in Internet Explorer 6.

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This is incorrect.... I am on IE6 and TLS 1.0 was enabled by default. (I DID NOT HAVE TO CHECK IT when i first got IE6)

I wonder why all of a sudden they have a hard on for IE6 and 7... (Lots still use both versions)

This is a good start as to why.

»www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ ··· tform=XP