UPDATE: It seems like Facebook joined the campaign as well: Facebook joins the war against IE6!!!

If you are accessing my blog with IE6 you will see above the header a green box that informs you that you are using a "obsolete" browser, and that there are more modern browsers available: IE7, IE8 beta, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

It all started with a tweet by Erlend Schei, developer for Finn (a kind of Norwegian eBay):

To everyone involved with major Norwegian websites: Why don’t we start a campaign to get rid of IE6? One week with visible upgrade suggestions on the frontpage.

The reason for his suggestion, which can be read on his blog is that "it would have been much better to use to make real good tool for users, rather than to correct errors that occur only in IE6"

And this got a huge response and in a few days the warning message was on all main sites in Norway. This campaign seems also to be kind of endorsed by Microsoft Norway. In a press release they say:

[...] The newer versions of Internet Explorer have support for international webstandards and significant improvements have been made to both security and functionality. Based on this we support the initiative that has been made to upgrade from Internet Explorer to newer versions. [...]

This campaign quickly gained international exposure when Wired published a post titled: Norwegian Websites Declare War on IE 6.

But enough with the background of this campaign. Joining the campaign is pretty simple: you just have to add a few lines of HTML + CSS to your blog. No Javascript involved: only conditional comments so that spiders and other browsers will not see it.

If you want to know more on the campaign, there is a wiki to keep you updated with the how the campaign is going: IE6 Do NOT want!

If you are not running IE6, here is a screenshot of it.

I'll keep this message on the blog for one week or so: it would be interesting to see if the number of IE6 users drops. The average of the last month has been 10% of the overall users.

If you care about the web and own a blog or site, please consider joining the campaign and adding the code for the message in your homepage. Web developers around the World will thank you.