If you have been browsing on youtube.com using Internet Explorer 6 lately, you may have encountered the following message:

We will be phasing out our support for your browser soon

As you can read, it seems that Google will be phasing out support for what was six years ago the most widely used browser during its tenure. This seems to be in sync with the end of Internet Explorer 6 and 7′s lifecycle on July 13, 2010, after which Microsoft will stop providing service packs and updates for both versions.

While the use of IE6 seems to decrease steadily in western countries and most European and American websites tend to abandon support for Microsoft’s legacy browser IE6 (around 5% of site traffic for Digg for example) in order to concentrate on new features and simplify development, this same version of IE is still widely used in Asia (particularly in China and Korea, where browser shares reach about 60% of the market for IE6, and 98% when combining numbers with the more up-to-date versions of the browser).

As I see it, we could see two different consequences in Korea.

First of all, this would involve updating computer software (browsers, but also operating system as newer versions of IE tend to be released in sync with newer versions of the Windows operating system) for a tremendous amount of machines in Asia.
Also, it would require a great deal of effort from developers in order to update existing web applications and make them working with recent browsers. Fortunately, if this tendency is confirmed, it may lead to great advancements in terms of usability, cross-browser compatibility, and democratization of open, cutting-edge web technologies (HTML5, ECMAScript4). It should also considerably alleviate website design, focusing more on accessibility, features or graphics rather than Javascript and CSS hacks.

Unfortunately, unless governments and organizations awaken and start to promote the use of newer, standard-compliant browsers (IE8, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Opera) and start pushing changes into business as well as higher education, consequences could become dramatic.
It could lead to the ostracism of Asian Internet, as not only would newer websites become incompatible with IE6, but as updates wouldn’t be pushed anymore, computer systems in these countries would become particularly vulnerable to hacking or virus attacks.