A personal view this one rather than a company view.
I read with interest at the end of last week that a campaign has kicked off in Norway to encourage people to upgrade from IE6 if they can. Sick of having to endlessly code around the vagaries of IE6 the organisers are encouraging all websites to pop up a warning message asking IE6 users to consider upgrading to a newer version.
This isn't a silly anti MS or anti IE campaign but a serious effort to move people forward so they can benefit from the new technology, techniques etc etc that come with more up-to-date browsers.
We added a couple of days to our efforts in redesigning the new Sitemorse interface in December just try to get IE6 to look acceptable. We gave up on true compatibility. I reckon there's a couple of guys in Sitemorse that would support this campaign wholeheartedly. And apparently, thanks to Twitter, the campaign is getting lots of attention Worldwide. The Norwegians even managed to find a friendly local Microsofter to endorse the campaign (well actually she agreed it would be great if people moved to IE7 !)
Here's the article that appeared on WIRED last week:-
Several large websites in Norway have launched an advocacy campaign urging Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade their outdated web browsers.
Leading the charge is Finn.no, an eBay-like site that is apparently the largest site for buying and selling goods in all of Norway (Finn is Norwegian for "Find"). Earlier this week they posted a warning on their web page for visitors running IE 6. The banner urges them to ditch IE 6 and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.
Dozens of other sites, including the influential tech news website Digi.no, have joined the campaign, but have widened the playing field by suggesting either upgrading to IE 7 or switching to an alternative like Firefox, Safari or, of course, Norway's own Opera browser.
The drive is spreading to other countries.
Sites in Sweden, Indonesia and Australia have joined in. Norwegian blogger Peter Haza is cataloguing the participants and an international wiki called "IE6 - DO NOT WANT" has been set up to track the spreading browsercide. There's a Facebook group, too.
Even Microsoft is supporting the campaign. Norwegian news site Teknisk Ukeblad reports Thursday that Microsoft Norway's Alveberg Isabella says, "We of course hope that our users follow us on [upgrading] to Internet Explorer 7."
IE 6, released in 2001, is the scourge of web programmers, user-experience designers and technical-support staff alike. The browser is stacked with quirks that cause web pages to render differently from all other browsers, and special considerations must be taken by web builders to accommodate users running IE 6.
Most wish the browser would just go away, eliminating the need to continue supporting it. Numbers vary from country to country, but somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the web's worldwide users are still running IE 6 -- some because they simply don't know any better, some because they are stuck with whatever software their companies install on their machines. Finn.no notes that 17 percent of its users are running IE 6. Numbers like that are currently too large for web builders to ignore.
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