Web designers to hold IE6 funeral on March 4

Washington, Feb 26: A tongue-in-cheek funeral for the declining Microsoft's (MSFT) Internet Explorer 6 on (IE6) will be conducted on March 4 by a Denver Web design firm.

Announcing the funeral through a site, ie6funeral.com, Aten Design Group attached a short obituary along with an invitation to a wake.

"Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010, in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google , Inc.," the obit read. "Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as 'IE6,' is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight."

The mention of Google (GOOG) and March 1 in the site is with reference to the Google's recent decision to drop IE6 from the list of supported browsers for its Google Docs online applications including its Google Sites hosting services from on Monday, Mar 1.

Starting Mar 13, the IE6 support will also be dropped from Google's popular video site YouTube.

Briefing on the funeral, Justin Toupin, the founder and creative director of Aten Design said ironic way of bidding goodbye to an online application that they loved to hate.

"We thought it would be funny to do an IE6 funeral," said Justin Toupin, the founder and creative director of Aten Design , in an interview. "It's a humorous spin on a browser that a lot of us have loved to hate for a long time. We're just saying that it's a fun way to celebrate companies like Google saying that they're no longer going to support IE6."

However, Toupin said that while the invitation for the funeral had started out as a joke on the part of the design company but the response to the funeral invitation was alarming.

He said that so far they have received 700 RSVPs to its March 4 event, which was more than the people they usually have for the small in-office parties for the Denver Web design and development community that Aten Design regularly hosts.

"Now we have to figure out what to do about the actual party," Toupin said. "We have a pretty small office. This kind of blew up on us."

Toupin said that while he had nothing personal against IE6, he would definitely want it to go like many of the web designers.

"It does involve, toward the end of a project especially, considerable work adjusting things like CSS and JavaScript to make sure they work," he said. Aten now evaluates IE6 support for its projects on a case-by-case basis, Toupin said.

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