Close on the heels of Microsoft’s last-week launch of a beta version of Windows Live Messenger that integrates with Facebook Chat, the social networking site recently announced that it soon intends ending Internet Explorer 6 support (IE6) for Chat.
 
Saying that the kill date is September 15 – the day the first IE9 beta will be released, a Facebook Blog post noted that the reason behind the move to pull the plug on IE6 in Chat function is: “Many of you have told us that sometimes your Chat session comes and goes or even stops completely. We're working hard to end those interruptions so that your experience is stable and consistent.”

Adding that the biggest enhancements result from changes that are not supported on older web browsers, the blog post further elaborated: “We've decided to make rapid improvements and provide the best Chat experience possible, which means we will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 browsers.”

Despite the fact that the IE6 is a widely-used browser by organizations, the primary concern with the version is that it is not compatible with Web 2.0 – for most of the Web attackers, the IE6 is generally the weakest link and the easiest point of entry into a network. 

IE6 lacks some of the key security controls like DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and PMIE (Protected Mode IE), which hamper the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities by attackers; thereby limiting what an attacker can access or exploit even after gaining control of the IE process.