With the recent “browser wars” pushing the market forward after many years of stagnation, the once ubiquitous Internet Explorer 6 has seen a steady decline in users falling under the 10 percent mark in some cases. Sparked by increased competition, especially from Mozilla's Firefox, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7 in 2006 and recently IE 8, bringing a lot of new features and a major upgrade over IE 6. This made Digg, the popular social link aggregator, consider dropping support for the aging browser altogether.

“Here at Digg, like most sites, the designers, developers, and QA engineers spend a lot of time making sure the site works in IE6, an eight-year-old browser superseded by two full releases. It consumes time that could be spent building the future of Digg,” Mark Trammell wrote on the Digg blog.

Traffic numbers for the site showed IE 6 accounting for 10 percent of Digg visitors and only 5 percent of page views, a drop from 13 percent and 8 percent respectively last year. However, the browser only made up 1 percent of the activity on the site, digging, burying or commenting.

The problem with this is that web developers, and Digg engineers are no exemption, spend a disproportionate amount of time making sure their sites work well with IE 6 compared to other browsers including newer versions of Internet Explorer.

“Based on the amount of activity and the relative rate of its decline, we’re likely to stop supporting IE6 for logged in activity like digging, burying, and commenting. Users of IE6 would still be able to view pages — just not logged in. This won’t happen tomorrow, but we’re thinking about doing it soon,” he concluded.

But Digg also set out to find out exactly what browsers were used and where and why aren't IE 6 users upgrading. It found that browser usage at home was pretty much keeping with other studies with IE (all versions), still dominating the market at 56 percent, followed by Firefox with 46 percent (the poll let users specify multiple options). At work, though, there's a completely different view, with IE used by 90 percent of the respondents, followed by Firefox with 19 percent.

A further study showed that the majority of those not upgrading had no choice either because they didn't have administrative access or their employers didn't allow it so the only hope is that system administrators wise up and start installing newer browsers.