IE6 declared dead in the USA

Ding dong, the witch is dead. And by 'the witch', we mean 'IE6'. And by 'dead', we mean 'only now used in the USA by utter die-hards and very unfortunate people'. As evidenced by Microsoft's Internet Explorer countdown, the USA has gone green, signifying that fewer than one per cent of the country's web usage is from Internet Explorer 6.

The USA joins a small number of other countries with this very low level of IE6 usage, including Sweden, Austria, Denmark and Mexico, but the USA is by far the biggest to largely be rid of the ancient browser, and Microsoft's Windows Blog celebrated with a cake. Microsoft's Roger Capriotti thanked everyone for their support and said it's clear the company's attempts to finally mothball its ancient browser were working. "We hope this means more developers and IT Pros can consider IE6 a 'low-priority' at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser," he added.

However, for all the celebrations, the battle isn't yet won. IE6 usage in China remains above 25 per cent, and many enterprise customers are still forced to use the browser. Despite this, Peter-Paul Koch recently told us that it's time to simply ditch IE6 and IE7 support immediately or "we'll never be rid of them".