Summary: The "Blue E" is losing whatever mojo it had left as its hostility towards security and web standards has version 6 abandoned by the NHS and the Internet's giant, Google

THROUGHOUT the month of January, Internet Explorer made many headlines [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] for all the wrong reasons (from Microsoft's perspective).

Here is a new cartoon about IE, as well as the announcement from Google that it is abandoning Internet Explorer 6 support.

Google will phase out support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 Web browser starting in March, the company said Friday.

This is covered in a variety of other news sites and discussed in Slashdot. It can lead to greater Microsoft-Google tensions just as everything heats up between those two.

Microsoft has accused Google of behaving like Microsoft.

Not only Google but The H too has just ranted about Internet Explorer, calling it "a problem child" in the headline and adding:

Users should consider using an alternative, such as Firefox, Chrome or Opera. Although these browsers also contain critical security vulnerabilities – with developers frequently fixing critical bugs in Firefox in particular – there have so far been almost no zero day exploits for these vulnerabilities. Criminals continue to concentrate their attacks on Internet Explorer. Firefox's growing market share may mean, however, that it too could soon find itself under increasing fire.

Australia, New Zealand, France, and Germany have already warned against the use of Internet Explorer. The UK, however, is in Microsoft's bed, as usual. Its government seems to be listening to Microsoft's lies about Internet Explorer security.

While the UK government contends that “there is no evidence that moving from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure”, there are many others who would disagree.

More details at The Register:

Google and the NHS may soon be ditching support for Internet Explorer 6, but that hasn’t stopped UK government officials from declaring the browser doesn’t give them cause for concern, unlike their French and German counterparts.

But also at The Register yesterday:

DoH tells NHS to dump IE6

The Department of Health has told trusts using Windows 2000 or XP to move to version 7 of Microsoft's browser.

We wrote about problems that the NHS was having with Internet Explorer just over a week ago and "Manchester Police [is] cut off from database for three days with virus," says one person who points out this report from the BBC. It says: "Greater Manchester Police (GMP) has been cut off from a national€  criminal database for more than three days because of a computer virus.

"IT experts disconnected GMP from the Police National Computer (PNC)€ after finding the conficker virus on Friday."

“Microsoft essentially made money from Conficker.”A fortnight ago we learned that other parts of Manchester's public sector suffered from Windows viruses and it's not the first time this happens here. Microsoft was called in and was paid millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to repair the damage its software had caused. Microsoft essentially made money from Conficker.

Microsoft will probably blame users who do not patch their installations, but as long as Microsoft spreads its software for free under constant threats, Conficker will always be a problem. It's the cost of Microsoft's dishonesty. ⬆

"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."

--Bill Gates