A gentle reminder to IE6 users: please move on.

Discussions about the seemingly immortal IE6 are common on the internet these days. Visit any web development forum and you’re likely to find at least one thread full of designers complaining about IE6’s refusal to die. I for one enjoy these verbal beat-downs because they provide a place to vent my frustrations with a product that has caused me many, many hours of agony. Unfortunately, what these group therapy sessions don’t provide is a pro-active solution to the problem.

A lot of people will simply drop support for IE6 entirely. While I do think this is a good idea if you’re in a position to do so, it doesn’t provide IE6 users with an explicit explanation as to why they should upgrade. It’s fair to assume many IE6 users may not even realize their browser is outdated. They stumble across a site that breaks and more than likely they will blame the site itself – not IE6. The problem persists.

Along comes Adrian Pelletier’s neat little script called Attention IE. The script uses a conditional comment to identify the browser and version, and if appropriate, deploys a friendly message alerting the visitor that they’re using an outdated browser and need to upgrade. So simple, so great.

At this rate maybe we can hope IE6 usage will drop below 10% by the beginning of 2010.