ie6countdown.com - a wolf in sheep's clothing
It seems that Microsoft are just as sick of users sticking with IE6 as web developers are, if their latest ie6countdown.com venture is anything to go by. You'd think that web developers - at least the ones who haven't already abandoned support for IE6 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has launched ie6countdown.com, a public tracker of Internet Explorer 6 usage share framed as a countdown to the browser's demise — an unusual move for a vendor campaigning against its own product. The static.html write-up is pointedly skeptical, dubbing the site "a wolf in sheep's clothing": the suspicion being that the campaign serves Microsoft's interest in migrating holdouts onto newer IE versions (and Windows upgrades) as much as the web's interest in shedding a decade-old rendering engine.
The campaign lands after roughly two years of developer-side pressure that Microsoft largely watched from the sidelines: Norwegian sites publicly banning IE6 in early 2009, Mashable arguing that summer that IE6 must die for the web to move on, and Google offering its own workaround by letting IE users run pages on Chrome's engine via Chrome Frame. What changed by March 2011 is that the vendor itself took up the cause — converting a grassroots protest into an official, measurable exit program.
First-order effects
- Web developers who had already dropped IE6 support gain official vendor cover for that decision, while corporate IT departments standardized on IE6 become the campaign's explicit target audience.
Second-order effects
- Rival browsers benefit from a Microsoft-endorsed narrative that old IE is unsafe to keep: Google, which had already positioned Chrome Frame as the fix back in September 2009, can now point to Microsoft's own countdown as validation for switching outright rather than patching IE.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, end-of-life for entrenched legacy software shifts from user protest to vendor-run usage-share campaigns — a template where the manufacturer sets the retirement clock because it, not just developers, gains from forcing the upgrade path.
The trend: Legacy browser retirement is moving from grassroots developer revolt to vendor-orchestrated countdown campaigns, with the upgrade destination chosen by the same company retiring the old product.