ReadWriteWeb

Today the Internet bids another goodbye to Internet Explorer 6, whose U.S. death is inevitable. New data from Net Applications shows that less than 1% of U.S. Internet users choose IE6 as their browser of choice. And when it comes to the mobile/tablet browser market share, only 0.41% use some variation of Internet Explorer, period. iOS devices come with pre-installed Safari browsers, which make for 53.3% of the mobile browser market. Meanwhile, Opera Mini and an Android browser account for 21.66% and 15.87% of the mobile market, respectively.

Browser trends from Sitepoint showed some IE6 death signs just a month ago, noting that more people browsed the Web on their smartphones than used IE6 and IE7 combined.

Dear Web developers: Microsoft knows how many hours of your life have been wasted trying to troubleshoot designs and functionality for Internet Explorer 6, and they're sorry. They promise they're never going to do that to you again.

To ensure such nightmares are never relived, the company will start rolling out automatic upgrades to Internet Explorer across Windows 7, Vista and XP, the company announced in a blog post today. Rather than relying on users to update the browser themselves or requiring you to trick your parents into updating theirs around the holidays, Windows will update to the latest compatible version of IE on its own.

It's safe to say most Web developers would prefer not to support Internet Explorer 6. They'd rather put up a notice for the user to download another browser, or maybe just display the WAP-optimized version of the site instead.

But sometimes, it's not up to the developer to decide whether to support IE6. Your employer or client may require it. In a recent blog post Mike Davies reminds us that saving IE6 compatibility until the end of a project is a recipe for disaster. "If you leave IE6 testing and fixing to the end of your project, you have no-one else to blame for the pain but yourself," he concludes.

UniBrows, a plugin from Browsium that enables users to  use Internet Explorer 8 to view IE6-only sites, was released from beta today. The idea is to enable enterprises that require IE6 for legacy apps to be able to upgrade to newer versions of the browser. This would also provide a path to upgrade to Windows 7, which doesn't support Internet Explorer 6. UniBrows will also support IE9 in a few weeks, according to Browsium's Gary Schare.

As we've reported, Internet Explorer 6 persists in many enterprises for a variety of reasons. Many organizations run third-party or in-house applications that require IE6 but are too expensive to upgrade or replace.

Hard to believe it's already been a year since I posted my farewell to Internet Explorer 6. (By "farewell" I meant "Just frickin' die already.")

My post was prompted by the announcement that support was ending for IE6 on Google Apps; since then, IE6's decline has accelerated, dwindling into low-single-digit percentages of browser visits (if that) on most of the sites I manage.

And this week, the latest heavyweight jumped on the let's-kill-IE6 bandwagon: Microsoft, which launched the Internet Explorer 6 Countdown site. It sets a target of reducing IE6 usage to less than 1% worldwide.

Web apps that rely on features that only modern browsers can offer are becoming a standard feature on the Internet. Sadly, though, the fact that a lot of users don't regularly upgrade their browsers (or that their IT departments don't allow them to upgrade) complicates matters greatly for those developers who want to use the latest and greatest features of modern browser technologies like HTML5. The latest data from Pingdom and StatCounter, however, notes that a surprisingly large number of users (71%) already run the latest official versions of their browser.

We have to say that you know the end is near when entire countries advise their citizens to move on, but the final kicker comes when Google says that it will no longer support the browser that's been with us for nearly a decade.

Google-owned YouTube will end support for Internet Explorer 6 on March 13, just two weeks after ending support on Google Docs.

Companies are dropping Internet Explorer 6 in droves and vendors are quickly following the lead by sunsetting support.

It's a pretty safe move on the vendor's part. Data collected by the exo.performance.network shows how quickly companies are dropping the IE6, which was first introduced in 2001.

The word that Google has decided to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 as of March 1 will come as welcome but bittersweet news to designers and developers who have wrestled for years to make perfectly compliant sites work properly in that wretched browser.

Welcome, because this could well be the death knell for IE6. You can make a legitimate case to clients that, hell, if Google isn't supporting it, why should they?

Internet Explorer 6 is the browser that just doesn't want to die, even though it has now been superseded by two generations of Internet Explorer, and Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera offer great alternatives. Slowly, however, we are seeing that web developers are phasing out support for IE6, and the latest service to join this movement is Google's YouTube. According to some reports, a message now appears on YouTube when a user accesses the site with IE6, informing users that the service will be "phasing out support for your browser soon." The logos of Google Chrome, Firefox, and IE8 appear right next to the text.