Someone at Microsoft with a lot of clout has kicked someone in the jacksy and finally launched the IE6 Countdown campaign encouraging the discouragement of the use of IE6.

Developers are being asked to add the following banner to their sites for all IE6 visitors...

upgrade

People are being asked to educate others with the phrase "Friends don't let friends use IE6". They're almost right, friends don't let friends use IE fullstop. Enemies on the other hand are free to use what they want ;-) .

And as can be expected, they're also pushing people to harness the power of the various social networks to push the message out.

This is a great idea, pity it's taken several years for Microsoft to listen to the rest of the world and actually use their power, might and marketing machine to get people to upgrade. The 1% goal is quite optimistic and may be hard to hit as there are lots and lots of large corporations out there who have standardised on IE6 and they are not likely to upgrade without a good incentive.

I think to really hit this target, and ideally take the usage right down to sub-1% figures, they need to officially announce they will NOT be addressing any more security issues in IE6. They don't need to do it straight away, but maybe use the campaign to announce a date, eg 6 months from now. This would certainly provide the encouragement many companies need.

This campaign doesn't impact me much as I'm not a website designer/developer by trade so haven't even attempted to keep IE6 happy for several years now, but this will certainly please a lot of other developers I know.