Microsoft must be happy and consumers even happier for Internet Explorer 6 has reported less than 1% browser share in the U.S market. This surely is good news for Microsoft as it had started the IE6Countdown initiative to ensure users move to smarter options than IE6.
Started in March 2011, IE6Countdown reported that 12% of worldwide users prefer IE6 as their primary browser then and this has now come down to 7.7%. Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway have succeeded in bringing IE6 below 1% while China still reports 25.2% browser share of IE6 and India still has 5.4% of users who use IE6 as their primary browser.
However, it was party time in Redmond as Internet Explorer 6 usage in the US dropped below one percent with wishes that more countries should follow.
Microsoft sent out t-shirts and mugs this week to promote its IE6 Countdown site, underlining the fact that IE6 is near its end. But it isn’t clear if an IE6 alternative is either IE8 / IE9 or a different browser.
Design of T-Shirts distributed:
The IE9 Team celebrated this with a cake:
It is widely speculated that Google Chrome is cutting in to the Internet Explorer cake and at its present pace, soon it may turn out to be the most used browser on the planet. Not to be left behind, Microsoft has IE10 in its bag and the final version of Windows 8 may throw some surprises in this domain.
The browser market just got hotter!
