Microsoft: IE 6 drops to below one percent in browser usage share in U.S.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) team late last year stopped sending cakes (and cupcakes) to Mozilla to commemorate each new Firefox update. But there was cause for celebration in Redmond this week, given IE 6's usage hare dropped below 1 percent in the U.S., according to the latest Net Applications data.

(The cake pictured in the January 3 Microsoft "Exploring IE" blog post actually was from a Web camp in San Francisco at the end of 2011.)

"I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE6," blogged Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing.

In 2011, Microsoft launched an IE 6 countdown campaign to encourage users to migrate away from IE 6. At the end of last year, Microsoft announced plans to begin pushing automatically in 2012 the latest version of IE to users via Windows Update, which the company is hoping will further erode IE 6's marketshare. (XP users will get IE 8, since IE 9 doesn't work on XP.)

While IE 6's plummeting share is good news for developers stuck supporting multiple versions of IE, I know of a number of business users who are still stuck with it because they've developed internal apps that rely on it.

Speaking of IE and marketshare, Microsoft is continuing to lose browser share, thanks largely to Google Chrome's gains. Net Applications now pegs IE's share at roughly 52 percent in terms of browser usage share, down 11 points from the start of 2011.