You have probably already heard about the Norwegian campaign to end IE6. If not, see Ajaxian or Wired.

Although I sure hope that we (and in particular, me ) will spend less time on making web sites work perfectly in IE6 during 2009 than previous years, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this dreadful browser.

Personally, I believe – from first hand experience, that the large number of users stuck with IE6 is caused by the fact that many large corporations have invested a lot of money on applications that require IE6. These applications might be critical – as in $$$ – to the business. Also, there’s a lot of Windows2000 installations out there, and IT department are often not interested (and rightly so!) in upgrading to Windows Vista.

And as long as the users of these systems are stuck with IE6, should we really force a bad browsing experience upon them by not doing our best to support their browser?

If not, then why should we care even the slightest to make sure things work perfectly in Opera or Safari? Surely, there are less Opera and Safari than IE users out there … not to speak of the minority of people that use Linux-based browsers like Konqueror. Why is it important to optimize for some browsers (even though these have better standards support), but not for all? Or is it simply because IE6 == Microsoft? Are the customers using IE6 less worth in 2009 than in 2008?

I also think that IAllenkelhet.no [NO] has a point in asking whether this campaign really is the best approach. Shouldn’t we rather care about serving the needs of the user? After all, most users have some kind of goal, like finding information about a topic or product, when visiting a web site. Just because developers are sick and tired of IE6, should we bother users with technical stuff like this?

But if you ask me; yes, lets hope we’ve started to see the demise of Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and even 8! And if not, lets hope that the companies sticking to IE6 are also the ones paying the bill for keeping web sites “optimized” for the number 1 wreck of the browser world…

Update 2009-02-23: IAllenkelhet.no has created a better download page for Internet Explorer.