It might be hard to believe but Internet Explorer 6 is still alive and kicking ten years after it was released. Whilst IE has come a long way in terms of speed and standards compliance particularly in IE9 previous version left a lot to be desired. Needless to say, hanging on to decrepit software and forcing websites to maintain compatibility costs a lot of time and money and we’ve seen a bit of a shift away from IE6 support from the likes of YouTube.
Well, it looks like Microsoft wants to see off IE6 as well and they have put together a site to watch the declination of the usage of this old browser in the form of The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown. At the time of writing 12% of browser usage is generated by Internet Explorer 6 which was 9% lower that it was last year with China comprising a fair chunk of the overall usage of Internet Explorer 6 in the world. There’s even stuff on there to add a code snippet to your site suggesting to IE6 users that they upgrade as well as a message you can tweet to show your support for getting rid of IE6.
At any rate, this site might be good for a casual glance to check on how things are going towards the 1% target. Hopefully businesses will make the move from Windows XP to Windows 7 in the near future at, with that, to at least IE8 (although IE9 is far superior in my opinion in terms of functionality and integration with Windows 7) to help keep the momentum going.
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