When the desired death of a browser makes it into a full-page editorial of IEEE Spectrum – you know that the issue is finally starting to gain some traction. The tech blogosphere communities have been making plenty of noise about this for a while now. And I’d love someone to do an ‘economic’ impact analysis for IE6 – both in terms of development and security related incidents.

I think the Spectrum article (and the referring blog post from Digg) does a good job of describing the issues – corporate restrictions being high on the list of reasons that prevent a user from upgrading. That said I’d rank Microsoft’s failed Vista strategy which resulted in downgrade options to Windows XP being offered by manufacturers, along with the number of illegal and non-updating XP installations out there as just as large a contribution.

Despite my earlier and naïve attempt to ban IE6 from my site I’ve now successfully bared the browser using IE conditional comments – which is the only reliable way you can detect this version of IE (you can’t sniff for it reliably). I then display the following :-)