ie6 on the way out

Thousands of Web developers will soon be able to breathe a big sigh of relief. Microsoft's IE 6 really is on the way out.

In really rough numbers, IE 6 has been losing about 20 points per year. That's freefall! Just take a look at that line and what it represents and then ask yourself, "what can I do to kill off IE 6?"

data for this chart is courtesy of Net Applications browser market share report.

The only question is how quickly this will happen. I think it will definitely fall under 10% by the end of this year, and it's not at all unreasonable that it would fall to low single digits if Firefox has a really good year.

There is a floor considering that IE 7 and 8 won't be available for pre-XP SP2 users, but fortunately that's a very small percentage of the global market. (Hey Opera, how about seriously targeting those users since you guys are the only modern browser left supporting ancient versions of Windows?)

So you've got my prediction. Now it's your turn. How low and how quickly do you all think IE 6 will go?