With the exception of specialized corporate/government environments and intranets, the arguments for continued usage of IE 6 are all but over.
On its new website, IE6Countdown.com, Microsoft is making its most concentrated effort yet to get users to move away from the decade-old browser. As the site says in its preamble, "10 years ago a browser was born. It's time to say goodbye." The goal of the website is to get Internet Explorer 6 usage to drop to less than 1% worldwide.
Current IE 6 usage on a global level is 12% - though in many parts of the world, that figure is less than 5%. In the U.S., Net Application's most recent numbers indicate that 2.9% of web users are still using IE 6.
The website has links to reasons why users should upgrade, documentation for corporate networks that need to migrate to a new browser and banners that webmasters can embed in their sites, alerting users that they should upgrade.
This is all well and good, but we sure hope that there is a multi-lingual version of this campaign. We say that because the bulk of iE 6 usage comes from China, where 34.5% of users are still on IE 6. South Korea, India, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam also still report more than 10% IE 6 usage.
It's a long time coming and the faster we can move on to more modern browsers, the better the web ecosystem as a whole will be.
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