Once the world’s most popular browser, Internet Explorer 6 is dead. With U.S. usage sinking below 1% of the market, they’re calling the Time of Death at January 3, 2012 for the ten-year-old browser.

But this was no accidental death.

Microsoft has actually been trying to snuff IE6 for quite some time. On their own blog, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote:
“IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away.”

So, why would the software behemoth be so eager to kill its own product?

Long story short, all browsers handle information differently, so to make a website look and act right web developers have to create slightly different versions for each browser.

Problem is, making a website work on IE6 is very time and labor intensive so most developers end up just wishing it would fade away.

Wish granted. With IE6 officially buried, developers can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

It does make one wonder though — what kind of a person would so stubbornly cling to such a painfully out-of-date browser that barely works anymore that you could replace with just two mouse clicks?

Whoever it is, they’re probably not any target market you’d want in the first place.