Apparently, there’s a new war going on, or a campaign, rather, launched in order to convince corporations and websites to make Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 usage impossible on their sites. There’s plenty of information out there, on why phasing out IE6 is imperative. You could go here or here, or to a number of various international and national campaigns to that effect.
Allegedly, maintaining websites for IE6 users takes too much of a toll on web developers, as well as bandwidth and server resources, as I understand it.
It would appear that the campaign originally started in Norway, which makes the illustration above all the funnier. No Opera? I’m sorry for that, but nicked the image somewhere. I’m such a bad, bad boy.
I can’t help thinking about the late 1990′s browser wars, and must admit that I’m still mourning the loss of Netscape, in a very quiet way. For the last four years or so, it’s been all Firefox for me, with a little Chrome, Opera and IE play on the side, just to check website functionality. Prior to that I spent four years running a corporate website, among other corporate communications chores, whose CMS actually demanded IE6 in order to work. Hopefully that’s no longer the case.
We shall fight in the streets…
But I saw something today, reminding me of Sir Winston Churchill’s famous words:
[...] we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…
You see, at first glance – at a distance – I could’ve sworn I saw a Firefox poster on the neighbourhood bus stop shelter. “Damn, so it’s come to this,” I thought. Apparently, my eyes played tricks on me, it would seem, once I got to take a closer look (then again; All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream, as the late Edgar Allan Poe once put it):
Pure Rush poster disguised as a Firefox ad - or is it the other way around?
Notice the head, if you please. You have to admit: The resemblance is somewhat striking, no? Oh, by the way, do you see the piles of snow reflected in the surface? That’s here. Right now.
Overwhelming Firefox presence
As for Insignificances, traffic figures reveal a total of 52.9 percent Firefox presence (all versions), 29.7 percent IE (all versions), 17.2 percent others (including Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Google Chrome and so forth). IE6 alone makes out a total of approximately 9.5 percent – undoubtedly on the decline.
And as always, I prefer ending things on a lighter note:
