Today Microsoft launched a new website in an effort to speed the demise of Internet Explorer 6. In a twitter post to the official Microsoft account the company proclaimed,

It’s not often that we encourage you to stop using one of our products, but for #IE6, we’ll make an exception: http://bit.ly/g0wt4m

The link redirects to the site, http://ie6countdown.com, which shows a map of estimated IE6 usage by country and announces the company’s goal to reduce the browser share of IE6 from 12% to 1%. From the map, it appears that the worst IE6 offender is China with 34% of Internet traffic coming from the browser compared with the United States’ meager 2.9%.

The site also offers suggestions on how to help friends and neighbors upgrade, declaring, “Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6.”

For anyone whose ever worked in web development, the demise of IE6 can’t come soon enough.