Ask any web designer what is the one thing that has done more damage to the Web than anything else, and you can be pretty sure that with one unified voice they would say Internet Explorer 6.

As the new browser wars continue to heat up, the one thing we can be thankful for, and will slow down the sale of the economy size bottles of aspirins to web developers, is that slowly but surely the use of IE6 is disappearing.

The fun part of this has been Microsoft’s response as IE6 slowly fades away. First they sent flowers when the Aten Design Group held a mock funeral for IE6 and now they are hosting a new site at ie6countdown.com to track the decline of this scourge of the Web.

From the announcement about the new site on the Explore IE blog:

Now that it’s 2011, IE6 is officially a ten-year old browser. According to Net Applications, IE6 still has 12% share worldwide. Our goal is to get this share under 1% worldwide. Why 1%? We realize that there might not a magic number for when web developers and IT pros can drop support for older browsers, but we believe that 1% will allow more sites and IT pros worldwide to make IE6 a low-priority browser – meaning you don’t have to invest as much time in updates or fixes. We recognize that IE6 usage varies depending on where you live, so ie6countdown.com includes the details of IE6 share by country. We will update the site’s stats on a monthly basis and celebrate as countries dip under the 1% mark!

All I can say is thank you and good riddance.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]