I’m sure you’ve heard about Internet Explorer 6, haven’t you? 😉

It’s the “world’s most favourite” web browser – no other web browser brings so many problems for web designers, so many issues when designing web pages, so I guess many many people are going to “celebrate” when it leaves us for good. It was first released back in 2001 so it’s been 10 years since it’s release.

Because there are so many issues with Internet Explorer 6, the good news is that web designers don’t optimize their websites any more (especially because Internet Explorer’s market share is dropping down all the time and it’s at its lowest share ever getting lower every month!).

As any web developer will tell you, working with IE 6 is one of the most difficult and frustrating things they have to deal with on a daily basis, taking up a disproportionate amount of their time. Beyond that, IE 6’s support for modern web standards is very lacking, restricting what developers can create and holding the web back.

This is really good news for us – web designers – as it used to be such pain to optimise for IE6. Another great news is the recent public anouncement from Google:

” Google will no longer support Internet Explorer 6. “

This means freeing up resources and spending more resources on improving the websites instead of wasting time trying to optimise the websites for IE6.

Here are the latest statistics on web browser usage for Internet Explorer 6 straight from Microsoft (official information from Microsoft – June 2011):

• US – 2%
• Canada – 2.6%
• UK – 2.6%
• Finland – 0.7%!
• Norway – 0.4%!
• Australia & New Zealand – 2.1%

Web experts predict that IE6 will die by the end of this year. It’s time to move on to new web browsers, maybe the web standard compliant ones like Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome.

Have a wonderful day!