Counting Down Internet Explorer 6 Usage Share
On this day a year ago, Aten Design Group hosted a funeral for IE6 in Denver, Colorado. We heard about it and sent flowers. While the funeral gave a strong indication of the desire to rid the world of IE6, the browser still has a presence.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands almost two years after Mashable's 'IE6 Must Die' argument, and the arc between them explains why Microsoft's own blog is now running the countdown: IE7 shipped in late 2006, yet per the IEBlog's own first-year retrospective on IE7, adoption crawled because most users got new browsers only when they bought new PCs. That lockstep between OS upgrades and browser versions is what kept a 2001-era browser alive deep into the web's HTML5 era.
The funeral Aten Design Group held in Denver in March 2010 turned developer frustration into theater — Microsoft sending flowers was a wink at its own legacy problem. The same day as this post, critics were already pushing back on the campaign site itself, calling ie6countdown.com 'a wolf in sheep's clothing', so the countdown reads as much as reputation management as engineering advocacy.
First-order effects
- Web developers get explicit top-down cover to drop IE6 testing and fixes, cutting support matrices that have persisted since the 2009 'IE6 Must Die' campaign.
- Enterprises still standardized on IE6 for internal line-of-business apps face rising pressure to migrate, since the platform vendor itself is now publicly measuring the browser's decline.
Second-order effects
- Google's earlier move to bolt a modern engine onto old IE via Chrome Frame becomes the pragmatic escape hatch for IT departments that cannot retool intranet apps fast enough to meet the countdown timeline.
- Competing browsers gain a recruiting argument: every point of IE6 share Microsoft concedes is contested by Firefox, Chrome, and later IE8/IE9 rather than defaulting back to the incumbent.
Third-order effects
- The structural lesson is that bundling browser updates to operating-system release cycles creates multi-year security and standards debt — the pressure this countdown represents points toward browsers being distributed and patched independently of Windows.
- If enterprise inertia remains the last redoubt of legacy share, industry attention shifts from consumer campaigns to corporate application-compatibility tooling as the real lever on browser death rates.
The trend: Browsers are decoupling from operating-system upgrade cycles, with developer pressure and vendor embarrassment replacing OS refreshes as the force that retires old rendering engines.