Many of the users world wide are still stuck with eight year old Internet explorer i.e. IE6 and haven’t upgraded to new version of it even though the latest version is at least two versions up from IE6. The reasons for not upgrading vary for each of them. I wont be talking about that here.

DiggNow out of those IE6 users, bunch of them are a part of Digg community and use Digg regularly. It seems a bad news coming for them. Digg is planning to stop supporting users of IE6 and most of the Digg activitities like digging, burying, & commenting will not be available to them.

As per Digg blog, they are pondering over the idea. So whats the idea? Should Digg block IE6? As per the blog and i quote that here :

Currently, IE6 usage accounts for 10% of Digg visitors and 5% of page views on Digg. While this is down from 13% and 8% a year ago respectively, IE6 still accounts for a fairly large portion of Digg usage. That said, a lot of time is spent by Digg engineers supporting site activity like diggs, buries, and comments in IE6, and while it accounts for 5% of site traffic, IE6 accounts for only 1% of diggs, buries, and comments.

So, there reasoning behind everything they plan to do is that perhaps the amount of resources used for IE6 compatibilty with Digg site is much more than the traffic and they can use these resources on other things instead of making Digg compatible with IE6.

IE6 digg users
IE6 digg users

One of the interesting thing that this blog post on digg mentions one of the main reason for people still using IE6 is because the Work computers dont let them upgrade from IE6 as they don’t have administrator access. Perhaps the IT administrators need to upgrade the systems at Work to latest versions of any browser of their choice.

So people, who are still using IE6 please upgrade.