StopLivingInThePast.com is Live – Join the Movement to Phase Out IE6 Forever

I’ve had enough. After years of mangling the otherwise clean and simple code of my site designs to try to make them work properly in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) I have absolutely had it. No more! I am not willing to deal with an old and outdated browser that never really worked in the first place any longer. And I’m not alone.

This last week a conglomerate of Norwegian sites including almost every newspaper and a series of large corporations joined together in the fight to phase out Internet Explorer 6 once and for all. All the sites have added IE6 specific warnings for their IE6 using visitors telling them that they are using an outdated browser and that it is time to upgrade. This is far from the first time an innitiative like this has been launched, but I don’t think it has had this much top-level support before. Microsoft Norway even went out and publically supported the move. This might seem strange to outsiders but in actual fact it makes a lot of sense: After all IE6 was phased out by Microsoft in 2006 and they are on the brink of releasing IE8 to the masses.

To help the phasing out process along I threw together a simple WordPress based site called StopLivingInThePast.com providing info, links and the all-important code that inserts a warning telling IE6 users they need to upgrade. The code is basic CSS and HTML and contains no JavaScript or any other elements that may interfere with the overall operation of sites and blogs. I even gave the style ID a really strange name so chances of style craches are minimal. The script uses the CSS commenting technique to filter viewers so that it only appears if the visitor is using IE6 or an even earlier browser. For reference it looks like this:

I’ll be adding a blog and more information to the site as time goes along but for now go to the site, get the code, insert it into your own site and tell all your friends, family, relatives, co-workers, IT professionals, designers, developers and anyone else you meet to visit the site, upgrade their browser and spread the word: Stop Living in the Past – Join the Movement to Phase Out IE6 Forever.