The ’90s were good for a lot, but also brought us a lot of things we could really live without: carpenter jeans, the first Gulf War, The Macarena, and Internet Explorer 6.

Each have had long-lasting consequences– Carpenter jeans turned into carpenter shorts, vets returned home with Gulf War syndrome, the Macarena still lives on at ballparks across the nation, and of course, tons of wasted hours trying to support a browser that should have been kicked to the curb a long time ago.

As a web developer, one of my jobs is to make sure that our clients’ sites look great in all browsers.  For the most part, I get it right in browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 7. But like 12.4 million (a semi-accurate-ish stat) other developers across the world, I spend entirely too much time having to piece together fixes to make these sites work and look good in Internet Explorer 6. That time could be better spent working on new business, improving upon old business, or innovating and creating new products for our company.

Just look at this completely fictitious yet surprisingly probable graph I came up with:

As you can see,  US Workplace Productivity (for web developer/designers)  is severely affected by the growth of the IE6 market share. A lack of productivity correlates to our debt and economic tailspin, and yet still today thousands of corporations insist on making Internet Explorer 6 the standard browser choice for their employees. I say it’s time for a revolution.  Shut down that browser and head over to Firefox  to get their latest, or visit Microsoft and grab Internet Explorer 7. While you’re at it,  replace your carpenter jorts with a nice pair of Diesel jeans and ditch your Michael Bolton tapes for some downloads of Wilco or The Killers.