PCs are the forgotten platform for Chinese banks, who are focusing development efforts on the mobile channel and leaving desktop users reliant on Internet Explorer 6.

For anyone involved in web development, having to support multiple older browsers is a constant hassle. And Internet Explorer 6, with its lack of support for modern web standards and reliance on proprietary ActiveX technology, is the worst. Even Microsoft wants it dead.

In most countries it's market share has dropped well below 1% so developers no longer feel the need to support it. But I was curious to see on Microsoft's deathwatch site for its die-hard browser that in China it still accounts for 22.2% of the market. Could this be true?

Other trackers such as StatCounter are saying that Microsoft's efforts are paying off and that market share in China for IE6 has declined dramatically over the past year to around 5%. But for various reasons, such as differing sample size and frequency of browser usage counting towards market share calculation, Microsoft disagrees (a more detailed discussion of this here ). The real number is probably somewhere in between.

But the fact remains that many Chinese people need to retain IE6 or one of the popular local browsers based on its kernel - such as Sogou, 360 or Tencent TT browser - in order to deal with their bank from a PC web browser. And it's a similar situation for government and many shopping websites.

In August last year Chinese website IT Times reported that due to ActiveX lock-in most of the major banks only supported older versions of IE on Windows. A few months ago it revisited its review  and while some progress had been made, support beyond Windows XP and IE6 or 7 was limited, and where online banking sites did work on Firefox, Chrome or any browsers on Mac, users could still not initiate payments using those browsers.

Founder of the Openbank compatibility listing website Zhang Wei Wu said that banks have talked about HTML5 standardisation for desktop browser-based banking, but he is sceptical about their commitment and progress, and believes that unified Apple and Android platform app development is where the banks will instead be focusing their efforts.