Being a web developer, the Internet Explorer 6 website browser has been a thorn in my side many, many times. Its mere existence can suck up valuable time and resources to create fixes and workarounds that will make, what is current standard technology, work for a browser used by a small fraction of website users.  Microsoft is now campaigning to get users to STOP Internet Explorer 6. Hip, hip, hooray!

Why is IE6 so bad? Being a 10 year old browser, IE6 is full of security holes, doesn’t have the features of the modern website browser, and basically just doesn’t play nice with modern website standards for coding making many websites unusable or just plain look bad.

So who are these people using a 10 year old web browser? Apart from those technophobes who are sitting around with box-style CRT monitors and still using Windows pre-XP, the main set of users of IE6 are actually corporate users. Large organisations such as banks and government departments. Surprised? We always are. You’d think large organisations with large in-house tech teams would be on top of this stuff. It tends to be the case that they somehow need IE6 to work with legacy systems. Thankfully as part of this push, Microsoft has developed technical resources, guides and tools to help those corporates finally kick the IE6 habit.

Why would Microsoft do all this to help kill of a product they once proudly pushed? The bottom line is that Microsoft are trying to keep up in the browser wars. With Firefox overtaking Internet Explorer in overall popularity, and Google’s Chrome coming up behind at a cracking pace, Microsoft is now playing a catch up game!

Check out the The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown website.