Microsoft Saying Goodbye to Internet Explorer 6 – Encourages You to Do the Same

Update: Usage in the United States drops below 1%! Microsoft is celebrating this amazing milestone with a special t-shirt:

Update 12/01/11: Down to 7.7%! Down 4.3% for the year and 6.9% from 2010! Lets keep it going in 2012!

Update 11/01/11: Up to 8.3%! Oh no, it went up! We’ll have to work on this…

Update 09/01/11: Down to 7.9%! Big improvement.

Update 07/01/11: 9.0%! Go go go!

Update 06/01/11: Down to 9.7%! Lets keep it up!

Update 04/01/11: Total IE6 market share is down to 11.6%! That’s .4% less than last month. We are making progress. Keep up the great work guys!

Update 03/14/11: The final version of Internet Explorer 9 will be released tonight at 9PM PST. Be sure to check out this link in order to download your copy!

Originally Published on: Mar 9, 2011 @ 11:38AM

“It’s not often that we encourage you to stop using one of our products, but for #IE6, we’ll make an exception: http://bit.ly/g0wt4m”

Straight from the mouths of the Redmond based company themselves via Twitter (@Microsoft). This latest tweet signifies a major shift in thinking when it comes to the future of the web; Microsoft is willing to admit that it is time to move forward and has even launched a campaign in order to encourage users to drop the 10-year-old software for it’s more up-to-date counterpart.

The goal of the site is simple – To watch Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.

Do you hear that? I do. It’s the sound of web developers rejoicing around the world. This is great news and will indeed save a lot of time while developing new web-sites without the need to go back in the end and debug for the ancient browser. As it is, it’s been over a year since Google dropped support for IE6 and Microsoft employees are pushing hard for this too!

As we can see from the map above, it looks like China is the leading supporter in IE6 with a whopping 34.5% usage. South Korea and India trail in next at 24.8% and 12.3% respectively. Right now, the current worldwide market share of Internet Explorer 6 is at 12% – that’s 12% too much.

Educate Your Friends

Ever hear the phrase “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk?”. Why is that? It’s not safe, that’s why! Microsoft encourages you to educate your friends to upgrade in order to ensure a safe browsing experience on the web. Not to mention the improved speed and better privacy settings. See chart below for a version comparison of old and new IE.

Click on Image to View Full Comparison Page

Educate Corporate Users

I would say a huge part of what keeps IE6 around is it’s integration with big corporations. The time and effort involved in order to upgrade to the latest technology for these companies may not be cost effective or may seem like a near-impossible task. This, coupled with the lack of knowledge on the subject can become a major determent.

The PC champion touches on this topic as well and even provides a few case studies to help IT departments better understand the process of upgrading; Dell, Wunderman & Indiana Office of Technology.

Show Your Support – Join the Cause

Here are a couple steps you can take to show your support of this cause and potentially help the users who are unaware of the problems they are causing by using such outdated technology.

Download the Latest Version

First and foremost, if you happen to be using IE6 or have a PC with it installed – upgrade now! You can upgrade to the latest version by clicking on the link here and then clicking on the “Upgrade Now” button.

Display a Banner to Encourage Updating the User’s Old Browser

Copy and paste the following code onto your web-site in order to display a small banner that notifies the user they are using an outdated browser:

[snippet id=50709]

This code displays the following banner only if the user is using a browser old than IE7:

Send In Your Logo

You can actually send in your logo to be featured in the list of participating web-sites.

Spread the Word via Facebook and Twitter

Social networking is probably one of the best ways this cause is going to gain massive support. In Facebook, you can simply copy and paste the link to this page here or to the official page in order to show your support.

On Twitter, you can tweet the following in order to show your support:

I’m doing my part to get IE6 to 1% #ie6countdown http://t.co/a1nVWua via @IE

Now, if Microsoft can launch the final version of IE9, with its extensive support for HTML5, and depreciate everything below that, we’d be absolutely golden!

Be sure to check back periodically to see the progress this movement has started.

How do you guys feel about this? Do you think Microsoft is doing a great job to show their support for future technology? Perhaps you feel they should of launched this campaign a long time ago. Let us know in the comments section below!