God I hope so. As a designer and front end developer, I’ve wasted timeless hours and money making sure websites were compatible for IE6, now I couldn’t care less, or should I?

I was recently at heart & Sole 2 in Gunwharf, Portsmouth where Microsoft man Martin Beeby was there giving a great talk, actually apologising for IE6 and making his vocation in life to rid the world of IE6. I’m jumping on his band wagon along with many sites and forums who really think it’s time for the world to finally say goodbye to this antique of a browser. It’s 10 years old!! In technology terms it might as well have been built in the 18th century.

The world is getting closer to ridding us of this browser menace. We’ve seen a staggering drop from 2010 15.9% to now, Dec 2011 only 8.3% of the world use IE6. The UK now only has 1.8%, the US 1.0%, so whom is bringing up the statistics. Unfortunately, even though this area of the world actually makes most of the technology of the world for mass production, it’s still using IE6, Asia. China has a staggering 27.9% usage, it makes me weep. If it wasn’t for the tasty Chicken Chow Mein and that cats are on the menu in the markets, I’d be a bit more upset. Out of the 8.3%, China has a staggering 4.7% share of it.

So why are they still using it. I really don’t know. I’m all up for joining a petition so that all browsers, IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome etc work together so us poor designers and developers don’t have to spend hours testing and making sure a site works in all bloody browsers, but that’s another story to look forward to.

I’m going to build a pop up on my sites, similar to flash, so it detects people with IE6 and re-direct them to anything, IE8, Firefox, Chrome, just get rid of IE6. So tell your friends, tell your work, join the cause and finally rid the word of this nuisance.