We have been designing and developing websites for a long time and there have been different ways of creating websites over the years. This has mostly been defined by Internet Explorer (IE) namely IE6 and earlier.

Back in the day, we used to make pretty static websites with the odd animated GIF. This was, of course, the standard back then because IE6 was easily the most used browser. Then came along the likes of Opera and Firefox which had new features and great support for JavaScript and the latest standard in HTML and CSS. This brought along another way of creating websites.

We, as creators of websites, now had to develop a website that would have great features, rich with JavaScript functionality and then use IE specific stylesheets and features. This, in essence, meant we basically create two websites; one for the futuristic web browsers and then one for IE6.

Microsoft quickly realised that they were falling behind and released two new web browsers; IE7 and IE 8. They were better but not close to the standards set by the other browsers. So this meant we now developed websites for the standard compliant browsers, IE in general and then IE6. Can you see our frustration here?

This finally brings us to the last way to create websites and one that we hope many people will start implementing. We as a website making company won’t support IE 6 unless it is needed. We would much rather suggest putting up a message asking visitors to upgrade their decade-old web browser if they are on the website and still using IE 6.

Microsoft agrees with us and has launched a campaign (the reason for this post) called IE6 Countdown. They have decided that enough is enough and are willing people on to add notifications to IE6 users that there are newer options available including IE9 which is pretty much standard-compliant. As of this post, 12% of the world still use IE6 and we can finally write it off when it goes below 1%. Here is a break down of this figure spread around the world.

As you can see South Africa is ranked pretty high up there and is, in fact, the 8th highest user of IE6 in the world. This is just so not cool!

So let’s support this campaign, even if you don’t support Microsoft, because we (and many other people) think it is time for IE6 to be removed from the web. Even if we only attempt to get 1% of South Africans using IE6 we would already be happy. The first step is to share this post with as many people as possible.