We’re not big fans of Adblock, since it kills off the primary revenue stream for our site. Revenue from advertising pays for server costs and other necessities when it comes to running a large website like WinBeta. With that being said, Adblock has announced today that they are killing Adblock Plus support for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, citing low market share and complicated development.
“So far, Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer has been supporting every version Internet Explorer version still in use – including Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. This not only complicated development of Adblock Plus, our website and infrastructure had to support Internet Explorer 6 as well. This meant for example continuing to support the outdated SSLv3 protocol because the more secure TLS 1.0 protocol is turned off by default in Internet Explorer 6. After reviewing the current market share of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 we’ve decided that we should stop supporting them,” Adblock stated in an official post (which I saw via TNW).
This now means the following. In order to use Adblock Plus, you need Internet Explorer 8 or higher. Hacks that were implemented on Adblock’s website in order to display correctly on Internet Explorer 7 and older will now be removed. SSLv3 protocol will also be deactivated on Adblock’s download servers, meaning that Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be able to connect unless TLS 1.0 is enabled manually.
Adblock cited a low market share for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as the reason it has removed support:
- Less than 2% of all Internet Explorer users hitting Adblock’s website or filter subscription servers are using Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7.
- Netmarketshare currently reports Internet Explorer 6 to have 4.15% market share world-wide and Internet Explorer 7 0.80%. These comparably high numbers are mostly due to a very high reported marked share of Internet Explorer 6 in China: currently 22.2%. The reported market share for pretty much every other country is below 2%.
- Baidu (the most popular search engine in China) disagrees and puts Internet Explorer 6 at 9.35% and Internet Explorer 7 at 2.99% in China — still a very high number but much more realistic.
- Other statistics services report significantly lower market share for outdated Internet Explorer versions: W3Counter reports 0.3% and 2.9% for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 respectively, StatCounter 0.28% and 0.46%.
Adblock also stated that if you are on Windows XP, you should definitely update to Internet Explorer 8.
