Fantastic news! Microsoft have launched a campaign to reduce the worldwide usage of Internet Explorer 6 to 1%. This is an extremely positive step to help people enhance their web experience and save web developers and designers a lot of time and money.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001 shortly after the launch of Windows XP. As time has gone on, and with that, the complexity of content on the web progressing, Internet Explorer 6 has been an absolute bane on the working lives of web designers and developers, because it does not support web standards, and also a security risk to it’s thousands of users, due to the huge amount of security holes that exist in the program.

Indeed, it took Microsoft until the release of Internet Explorer 8 back in 2009 to supply a web browser that was pretty much standards compliant. Internet Explorer 9 has recently been released, which has improved it’s compliance further, and included support for CSS3.

It’s great to see that Microsoft has finally realised that the continued existence of IE6 is slowing down the development of the web, and that browser has effectively thrown away the key for those people who aren’t so web savvy, who are missing out on new technologies, and who may not even realise that updating their Internet Explorer 6 browser is even an option. So, they’ve launched their Internet Explorer 6 countdown campaign which promotes upgrading to a modern, standards-compliant browser (you can guess which browser they’re plugging – I can’t blame them, I’d do the same!), and also monitors the demise of IE6. Their aim is to reduce it’s usage worldwide to just 1%.

When Scott and me started S7 back in 2008, we vouched that we would not support Internet Explorer 6 in our development of websites, which we have always highlighted to clients when committing to their projects.