Could it be that our days of wrestling with Internet Explorer 6 are over? What will we do with our folder of hacks that never seem to work twice? What will we do with the extra money we do not lose on every job?

All kidding aside, this is an exciting topic for Web designers. One of the hardest costs to justify to a client is why —even though their site looks great to most of the world— it will cost them extra to have it look good on their antique Windows machine running Internet Explorer 6 and earlier.

Many clients do not even know what a ‘Browser’ is and do not understand why it is extra work to style their site for that very difficult old browser.

Below is a an excerpt and a link to a good article (www.netmagazine.com) on the happy demise, let us hope it is true!

Ding Dong The Witch is Dead
Ding dong, the witch is dead. And by ‘the witch’, we mean ‘IE6’. And by ‘dead’, we mean ‘only now used in the USA by utter die-hards and very unfortunate people’. As evidenced by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer countdown, the USA has gone green, signifying that fewer than one per cent of the country’s web usage is from Internet Explorer 6.

The USA joins a small number of other countries with this very low level of IE6 usage, including Sweden, Austria, Denmark and Mexico, but the USA is by far the biggest to largely be rid of the ancient browser, and Microsoft’s Windows Blog celebrated with a cake. Microsoft’s Roger Capriotti thanked everyone for their support and said it’s clear the company’s attempts to finally mothball its ancient browser were working. “We hope this means more developers and IT Pros can consider IE6 a ‘low-priority’ at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser,” he added.
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