On February 12th our lives will change. When you walk down the street you may see a few people here or there with an extra spring in their step, you may hear peals of laughter from dark corners of your office or flagrant hoydenism among people who you may have thought mute. How do you ask? With the economy grinding down despite Federal twiddling, the dollar sliding into the dirt and the implosion of the housing market soon to be followed by the burst of the web 2.0 bubble, how could anyone be filled with unabashed hope for the future? Simple: on February 12th, Internet Explorer 6.0 is dead. Microsoft, in a move that will go down in history as “rather swell,” will force upgrade IE 6.0 to IE 7.0. This will end a seven-year reign of arrogant non-compliance, high tower decision making, blasted web budgets and the most universally accepted broken product in human history. Not that IE 6.0 didn’t have its moments. Its list of accomplishments include the following:

1) It’s not IE 5.0
2) Firefox

Unfortunately for short-sighted businesses and some equally short-sighted programmers, IE 6.0’s departure will mean their business applications illogically built only to run on IE 6.0 will need to be reprogrammed, but this is a minuscule price to pay for the (semi)logical compliance of Internet Explorer 7.0. This is not to say that IE 7.0 is a peach, but by mid-2008 the beta for IE 8.0 will be hot in our hands, driving the last rusty nail in IE 6.0’s well deserved, and long overdue, pine box.