Internet Explorer 6 is finally going where it belongs

It seems that Microsoft’s internet team does not have to wait the end of the year to have their resolution fulfilled for 2012. According to a recent post on the Internet Explorer blog, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 6 usage in the US has now officially dropped below 1%.

Last year, the story around the wed was dominated by the constant decline of Internet Explorer overall browser usage, while Microsoft proudly focused on the continuous increase of Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 and avoided any story related to IE decline. In 2012, the story will certainly be different with Microsoft keeping focusing on the rise of IE9, and the software giant undoubtedly and finally acknowledge the decline of hated IE6.

In the post, Roger Capriotti from the IE team, talks about the news writing that “IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away. In fact, we launched the IE6 Countdown site last March to help accelerate the process. Less than a year later, I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE6. In addition, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal and the Philippines are also entering the Champions’ Circle. 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.”

The blog continues with the IE teams acknowledging the community stating that “We couldn’t have done this without the help of the community and our IE6 Countdown partners – thank you to everyone for your support. Since we launched IE6 Countdown, we’ve had over 2.75 million visitors and 5.6 million page views of the site – it’s clear people are using the content and taking the action to heart! If you’ve attended any events with us in the past few weeks you’ll know that we’ve been expecting this any day now and we’ve had a great time sharing a few drinks and toasts with you in anticipation of this moment.” While it is true that the community‘s involvement has certainly contributed to end of the soon-to-be-dead browser, the new initiation of Microsoft to silently auto-update their internet explorer would eventually lead to the total demise of IE6.

As for now, Internet Explorer 9 remains the number one browser on Windows 7 approaching close to 40% broswer usage on the US and nearly 30% share internally. Microsoft made IE9 avalaible only to Windows 7 and Vista focusing on better support wed standards and accelerate hardware.