The Daily Telegraph is reporting that the British Government won’t be upgrading from IE6 to a more up to date and more secure web browser. This comes after an online petition was started by Dan Frydman at a website design company in Edinburgh. The petition was signed by over 6000 people asking the Government to upgrade from the older IE6 web browser.

The online petition claims that ‘IE6 has some security flaws that leave users vulnerable’ and ‘Most creative and software development companies are forced by government department clients to build websites for IE6…’

IE6 was released in 2001 and it has been reported by security experts to contain critical security flaws that enable hackers to take remote control of a computer. Microsoft advice is to upgrade to their latest browser IE8 which is more secure. 

The government’s response was to ‘confirm that the Government takes internet security very seriously’ but the response goes on to say that ‘Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users.’ and ‘It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users.’