Editor’s note (May 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in February 2009, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In early 2009, a Norwegian blogger tweeted. It was a simple question – a “spring cleaning” proposal aimed at operators of major Norwegian websites: post a message encouraging IE6 users to switch to something better. For several days, newspapers, portals and blogs in Norway were still displaying browser warning banners to anyone visiting in Internet Explorer 6.
What started as a week-long experiment became a coordinated, industry-wide push — and the first model of how the web could retire its technical debt.
The story is more than a technological curiosity. It’s a case study of how distributed communities of developers, publishers, and users can drive change together — and the lessons are clearly applicable to how bloggers and content creators make platform decisions today.
Why was IE6 such a problem?
Launched in Internet Explorer 6 2001 and by 2009, despite being technologically obsolete, it still held onto a significant portion of web traffic. It was a constant nightmare for web designers and developers. IE6 was not up to modern web standards, which meant that every site had to be tested twice: once for the real web, and once for the hacked, proprietary version of IE6 that was provided. Hacks, conventional stylesheets, and workarounds were standard practice—time spent compensating, not building.
The cost, especially for publishers, was real. Maintaining backward compatibility with IE6 meant slower development cycles, bloated codebases, and a ceiling on what you could do visually and functionally. It left the entire ecosystem behind.
Users, for the most part, knew none of this. Many were on corporate machines where IT departments monitored browser installations. Others were not told there was a better option. The problem wasn’t malice – it was inertia.
Here’s how Norway solved it
The resulting campaign was deliberately weak. Sites participating in the campaign, which aimed to satisfy users of the older IE6 update, did not disrupt the experience of these visitors – they were simply presented with a message explaining that a newer browser would serve them better. IE6 users can dismiss the notification and continue. No one was locked out.
Finn.no, one of Norway’s largest classifieds platforms, was the first to act. Then the newspapers picked it up. Then blogs. Coordination happened informally via Twitter – the #IE6 hashtag became a real-time tracker of who was joining.
Microsoft Norway expressed its support to the public, noting that users would be happy to switch to IE7 or the then-upcoming IE8. Most developers sincerely hoped that users would completely switch to Firefox or another non-IE browser, but the campaign’s stated position was neutral: anything newer than IE6 will do.
Swedish tech media publication Mindpark confirmed this and covered it, and similar talk began to spread in Scandinavia. Tools and WordPress plugins appeared almost immediately, so small publishers could add the same browser warning without custom development.
Why is this still important for bloggers and publishers?
The story of IE6 is not about the browser. It’s about what happens when a fragmented industry stops tolerating the friction it has the collective power to overcome.
In 2009, publishers faced a familiar dilemma: serve the user where they are, or drive them to something better? The Norwegian campaign chose the third way – inform without blocking. It respected user autonomy while changing information asymmetry. Users didn’t know they were missing out. It was once said that many chose to improve.
These dynamic maps directly impact the decisions content creators face today. The web still runs on old assumptions—bloated ad stacks, outdated CMSs, and third-party dependencies that pose performance and security risks. The equivalent of “IE6 support” is seen every time a blogger continues to run a plugin that hasn’t been updated in three years, or stays on a hosting plan that doesn’t support modern PHP versions, or relies entirely on a social platform for audience access without building their own infrastructure.
The Norwegian campaign succeeded because it was coordinated, clear and constructive. It didn’t penalize users for being on IE6. He brought them up. It’s a model worth remembering when the difference between where your audience is and where they are is costing you and them something real.
The larger lesson: collective action and platform standards
One of the underappreciated aspects of the IE6 campaign is that it demonstrated what distributed coordination can achieve without any central authority. No standards body has mandated. There are no government regulated browser versions. A single tweet sparked a move that helped drive down IE6’s global market share, along with similar initiatives by Google, YouTube and other major platforms in the years that followed.
This makes sense. The technical base of the web has improved because the people with the platforms have decided to use them to inform rather than to punish.
Bloggers today have more platform influence than they sometimes realize. Recommending a modern browser, connecting readers to security best practices, writing transparently about hosting options, or simply being honest about what tools really work—these are the small actions that shape the information environment, concentrated in thousands of independent publishers.
The IE6 campaign was, in essence, an act of publishing responsibility. A community of people who care about the Internet are taking advantage of the opportunities they have to steer it in a better direction.
What the web did right — and what took too long
It is also important to note what did not work. The campaign was effective in Norway, but the global take-off of IE6 was slow – painfully so. Enterprise environments in particular have been around for years, and in some corners of the world, IE6 remained in active use well into the 2010s. Polite messaging only goes forward when institutional inertia is involved.
A more sweeping decision came when the major platforms stopped hedging: Google announced in 2010 that it would end support for IE6 across all of its products, and YouTube followed suit. When the price of staying on an old browser is losing access to the most used services on the web, the installed base has finally shifted.
The lesson there is also valid. Gentle nudges work in open, informed communities. When inertia is structural, changing behavior at scale sometimes requires a harder line—dropping support altogether.
Campaign as template
For bloggers and independent publishers, the Norwegian IE6 campaign offers a useful template: identify the friction that costs your readers, make it clear, give them an easy way forward, and coordinate with peers when possible.
It doesn’t require a Twitter hashtag or an industry coalition. It can be as simple as telling your readers which browser extensions improve their reading experience, or being transparent when a tool you recommend no longer holds up. It’s not about specific technology – it’s about posture. A publisher is doing a valuable job helping their audience find the gap between where they are and where they could be better.
In 2009, Norwegian tweets were small. It was not what it modeled.
