We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6.

The above is an online petition, which UK citizens, and residents, can use to petition our Prime Minister.

Why have I signed it?

Internet Explorer 6 is slowing the implementation of Web Standards. I enjoy browsing with Opera 5, but accept that many sites do not work with this historical browser, yet sites are being forced to work with an equally old Internet Explorer 6 because it accounts for 20% of internet hits.

Certainly in the UK, very few people use Internet Explorer 6 on their personal computers; even at work no one has IE6 on their home computer(s). The problem is mainly workplace usage. I work for a Government department, and we run nothing but IE6 on XP, just our small unit alone must account for thousands of IE6 hits a day - there is no option. At lunch time I pop to the library, there are 30 internet access machines being used intensively all day, all running Windows 2000 with IE6. The biggest employer in my town uses XP with IE6. Its the captive hits make up the bulk of IE6s usage. Hence, if Goverment stoped using it it would make a huge dent in usage and encourage companies to drop this old liability. Then sites can be written to standards, and if a browser fails to render properly its the browsers fault, and not a side effect of a work arround to make Internet Explorer 6 cope.