Microsoft in Australian IE6 upgrade bid

Microsoft has upped the pressure on any customers still running Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade the flagship browser, with a marketing campaign likening the product to stale milk.

A specially crafted web page, mainly aimed at its Australian customers, asks the question: “You wouldn’t drink nine year old milk, so why use a nine year old browser?”

It goes on to explain that the security features on IE6, although cutting edge at the time, have become outdated.

It quotes research from NSS Labs stating that the latest version of Internet Explorer, IE8, caught socially engineered malware 85 per cent of the time, compared to Firefox 3’s 29 per cent, Safari 4’s 29 per cent and Chrome’s 17 per cent.

IE6 continues to be used by a significant chunk of the global population, over 15 per cent according to some estimates, often because it is bundled in with the ever-popular Windows XP operating system.

Microsoft has made repeated attempts to get its customers to upgrade, however, perhaps aware of the bad publicity generated by stories of hackers exploiting its security vulnerabilities.

French and German authorities, for example, urged their citizens to dump Internet Explorer altogether after a high profile flaw allowed Chinese hackers to infiltrate the systems of Google and numerous other companies earlier this year.