Goodbye to Internet Explorer 6

I just came across a very interesting “comic” depicting the life and times of IE6 or better known as Internet Explorer version 6.  Because of wide spread usage of Windows XP, IE6 is still unfortunately still one of the most used browsers.

This is despite much better browsers being available including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Not mentioning IE7 and IE8 from Microsoft as the minimum to get away from IE6. Anyway, this comic really does illustrate the history of IE6 to this day and I encourage you to have a look on the Smashing Magazine website.

I think it’s time to ditch IE6. If you have a website, I would recommend you serve a minimal content version of your site, and encourage people visiting your site using this ancient browser to upgrade.  Perhaps you could have a ballot screen allowing people to select an upgraded browser (idea borrowed courtesy of Microsoft!…)

All of this comes of course with the recent story of Google China being hacked which prompted Google to stop people using IE6 from working with Google Documents and Spreadsheets.  See the announcement.