To everyone with control of mayor Norwegian sites: What about a spring cleaning to get rid of IE6? One week of encouragement on our homepages?

This has been followed up by VG.no , Start.no, TU.no and very soon right now (thanks @brumle) 50+ local newspapers all over Norway through A-pressen Interaktiv (API). While Finn and TU only links to IE7, which frankly isn’t that much of an improvement, VG points to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome, and Start throws Safari in the mix as well.

Homepage of finn.no, 18th of January 2009.

The warning/tip will only be displayed for a week, but this is a huge breakthrough seen from a front-end developers standpoint. It isn’t the first time someone is targeting IE6 with warnings, but it’s never been done on sites reaching such a large non-webby audience. This time it’s reaching those who really need to made aware of it: the end-user. This is a golden opportunity for mom & pop to learn that The Internet is not equivalent to the The Blue E.

The browser stats for these sites puts IE6 in the 10 – 24% ballpark, with the peak Monday mornings. Aside from demonstrating people’s work commitments at the start of the week, it proves that your mama is better than your IT-manager. There will always be those hiding behind politics, but seriously, who relies on software from 2001? To push the point further, Statoil, one of Norway’s largest companies has the dubious honor of providing a solid chunk of the IE6 visitors.

Luckily that will be a lot harder now that mainstream media is actually writing about, and to top it off- doing something about it. It is a dream coming true. Imagine spending development time creating the best possible websites instead of being restrained by IE6.

Now, who will be the first to follow up outside of Norway?

Update: A fellow interwebber has been collecting screenshots of the sites contributing. Also, this post has been dugg! Please give a digg if you care.

• position: relative
• zoom: 1
• height: 1%

They are all due to Microsoft’s proprietary concept of hasLayout.

Feel free to add any other magic bullets in the comments.