In February 2009, a Norwegian developer launched an aggressive campaign against IE6 usage. Soon after, several big Norwegian websites joined their efforts by ceasing all online support for IE6 users. Recently, the owner of the Weebly website building platform became part of the fight and created the
IE6nomore website.
Immediately following the website's launch, several start-up companies joined the campaign and implemented a set of new policies regarding IE6 users accessing their websites. Everyone using the outdated browser visiting websites affiliated to this movement will be greeted by a banner informing them that the website they are accessing doesn't offer IE6 support anymore, and they should upgrade to a modern browser. The banner can be seen in the image attached to this post.
Users are encouraged to upgrade to Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, Safari 4 or Google Chrome. The banner is available in several languages. The campaign rallied massive support in the web development community and some major websites, since companies like JustinTV (online video streamer), Posterous (blogging service), Reddit (video sharing website), Disqus (commenting service) and Buxfer (online money management tool) chose to display the banner and stop all IE6 support.
This move should come as no surprise, since YouTube
announced at the start of 2009 that it would stop IE6 support for the entire website, displaying a similar banner for its IE6 members. Also, .net Magazine launched a similar effort with its
BringdownIE6 website this year. The Britain-based magazine didn't stir as much interest like Weebly's campaign, since it didn't come up with more than a simple plan to encourage users to post a BringdownIE6 logo on their websites. Digg is also pondering dropping
IE6 support.
Weebly, YouTube and the Norwegian websites took it to a whole different level when they decided to simply phase out the outdated web browser. Considering that IE6 accounted for 15.21% of all Internet users in July 2009 (according to W3Counter), the move could backfire at website owners if users refuse or fail to update their browsers.
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