Editor’s note (May 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in February 2009, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In early 2009, a Norwegian blogger sent a tweet. It was a simple ask — a “spring cleaning” suggestion directed at whoever ran major Norwegian websites: put up a message encouraging IE6 users to switch to something better. Within days, newspapers, portals, and blogs across Norway were displaying browser-warning banners to anyone still visiting on Internet Explorer 6.
What started as a week-long experiment became a coordinated, industry-wide nudge — and an early model for how the web could push back against its own technical debt.
The story is more than a tech curiosity. It’s a case study in how distributed communities of developers, publishers, and users can collectively accelerate change — and the lessons apply just as clearly to how bloggers and content creators handle platform decisions today.
Why IE6 was such a problem
Internet Explorer 6 launched in 2001 and, by 2009, was still clinging to a significant share of web traffic despite being technologically obsolete. For web designers and developers, it was a persistent nightmare. IE6 didn’t comply with modern web standards, which meant every site had to be tested twice: once for the real web, and once for the broken, proprietary version IE6 rendered. Hacks, conditional stylesheets, and workarounds were standard practice — time spent not building, but compensating.
For publishers specifically, the cost was real. Maintaining backward compatibility with IE6 meant slower development cycles, bloated codebases, and a ceiling on what you could actually do visually and functionally. It held the entire ecosystem back.
Users, for the most part, didn’t know any of this. Many were on corporate machines where IT departments controlled browser installs. Others simply hadn’t been told there was a better option. The problem wasn’t malice — it was inertia.
How Norway tackled it
The campaign that emerged was deliberately low-key. Sites participating in a campaign aimed at making users of old IE6 upgrade didn’t break the experience for those visitors — they simply surfaced a message explaining that a newer browser would serve them better. IE6 users could dismiss the notice and carry on. No one was locked out.
Finn.no, one of Norway’s largest classifieds platforms, moved first. Then newspapers picked it up. Then blogs. The coordination happened informally, through Twitter — the #IE6 hashtag became a real-time tracker of who was joining in.
Microsoft Norway publicly expressed support, noting they’d be happy for users to move to IE7 or the then-upcoming IE8. Most developers, candidly, hoped users would switch to Firefox or another non-IE browser entirely, but the campaign’s stated position was neutral: anything newer than IE6 would do.
The Swedish tech media publication Mindpark covered it approvingly, and similar conversations started spreading across Scandinavia. Tools and WordPress plugins emerged almost immediately so smaller publishers could add the same browser warning without custom development.
Why this still matters for bloggers and publishers
The IE6 story isn’t about a browser. It’s about what happens when a fragmented industry stops tolerating friction it has the collective power to remove.
Publishers in 2009 faced a familiar dilemma: serve the user where they are, or push them toward something better? The Norwegian campaign chose a third path — inform without blocking. It respected user autonomy while shifting the information asymmetry. Users didn’t know they were missing out. Once told, many chose to upgrade.
That dynamic maps directly onto decisions content creators face today. The web still runs on legacy assumptions — bloated ad stacks, outdated CMSs, third-party dependencies that create performance and security risks. The equivalent of “IE6 support” shows up every time a blogger keeps running 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 reach without building owned infrastructure.
The Norwegian campaign succeeded because it was coordinated, clear, and constructive. It didn’t punish users for being on IE6. It educated them. That’s a model worth keeping in mind whenever the gap between where your audience is and where they should be starts costing you — and them — something real.
The broader lesson: collective action and platform standards
One underappreciated aspect of the IE6 campaign is that it demonstrated what distributed coordination can accomplish without any central authority. No standards body issued a mandate. No government regulated browser versions. A single tweet sparked a movement that, alongside similar initiatives from Google, YouTube, and other major platforms in subsequent years, helped drive IE6’s global market share down.
That’s meaningful. The web’s technical baseline improved because people with platforms decided to use them — not to punish, but to inform.
Bloggers today have more platform influence than they sometimes recognize. Recommending a modern browser, linking readers to security best practices, writing transparently about hosting choices, or simply being honest about what tools actually work — these are small acts that, aggregated across thousands of independent publishers, shape the information environment.
The IE6 campaign was, at its core, an act of publishing responsibility. A community of people who cared about the web used what reach they had to nudge it in a better direction.
What the web got right — and what took too long
It’s worth noting what didn’t work as well. The campaign was effective in Norway, but IE6’s global decline was slow — painfully so. Enterprise environments in particular held on for years, and in some corners of the world IE6 remained in active use well into the 2010s. Polite messaging only goes so far when institutional inertia is involved.
The fuller resolution came when major platforms stopped hedging: Google announced in 2010 it would end IE6 support across its products, and YouTube followed. When the cost of staying on an old browser became losing access to the most-used services on the internet, the installed base finally moved.
The lesson there is also applicable. Gentle nudges work in open, informed communities. When the inertia is structural, it sometimes takes a harder line — dropping support entirely — to actually shift behavior at scale.
The campaign as a template
For bloggers and independent publishers, the Norwegian IE6 campaign offers a useful template: identify friction that’s costing your readers something, surface it clearly, give them an easy path forward, and coordinate with peers where possible.
This 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’ve recommended no longer holds up. The point isn’t the specific technology — it’s the posture. A publisher who helps their audience navigate the gap between where they are and where they’d be better off is doing something valuable.
That Norwegian tweet in 2009 was small. What it modeled was not.
