Ryan Gavin, the director of platform strategies for Microsoft, told the U.K.-based Web site that he had been given the job of driving "IE6 share down to zero as soon as possible."

Thursday, however, Microsoft's Australian chief security adviser Stuart Strathdee told that companies are "happy to stay with IE6" because the creaky browser won't properly render sites that the firms don't want workers visiting, such as Facebook.

According to the latest data from Web analytics company NetApplications, of all browsers used in April. While that put IE6's share down 12.5 percentage points in the last year, representing a decline of 42%, it still exceeded the share of 2006's IE7 by more than five percentage points.

Microsoft will support IE6 on Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) until April 2014, but it has been pushing users to upgrade to IE8 as soon as possible. from Microsoft's site.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld . Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer , or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com .