What should we do about IE 6?

Matt's answer:

Matt Cutts: Here’s a really fun question from Bludge in London. Bludgen says, ‘I hate IE6! How would you propose we rid the internet of this outdated browser? (Both serious and humourous ideas would be welcome.)’ Well, you know, there are some people who have advocated like, ‘Die IE6!! Die!!’ kind of pages – where if you visit in IE6, it says, ‘Hey, you need to get with the program’ or something like that. ‘Dinosaurs last roamed the earth when you had a new browser’ or something like that. That is humorous. I — at the same time, I understand why, if you’re a business, you just want to have your security patches. You don’t want to change anything on your, on your systems. You don’t want to do a lot of configuration changes if you have something that works. One thing that’s kind of nice is over time, as Windows 2000, and then Windows XP and Vista sort of fall through their end of life cycle and people start to use Windows 7 and the newer operating systems, businesses will eventually upgrade and so eventually the browser IE6 will sort of become a little less important on the web. But there are still a lot of people that use it. I think we’re getting to a point where if people choose and if people use the operating system that they want, all of them are getting more secure; all of the browsers are getting better – so that’s a really good thing. So it may turn out to be you just have to wait a little bit more until you don’t see IE6 on your server logs quite as much.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: