Do Google's search warrant police run IE6?

According to popular perception, Google is the anti-Microsoft: a new-age outfit bent on re-architecting a flawed interwebs using nothing but open source software. The company runs its own flavor of Linux. It funded the rise of Firefox. And it eventually fashioned its own open source browser, Google Chrome.

But the reality is that Chinese hackers - or at least alleged Chinese hackers - pilfered intellectual property from the company's internal infrastructure via a hole in Internet Explorer 6, a Microsoft browser that made its debut in 2001. Certainly, Google was using IE6 to quality-test its public services - the company must ensure that, say, its search engine works properly with the aging Redmondian browser - but that's hardly an adequate excuse.