Microsoft has jumped on the ditch-IE6 bandwagon with IE6Countdown.com, following in the footsteps of such campaigns as Browse Happy, End 6, and Save the Developers.

Of course, since it’s a Microsoft-sponsored campaign, it’s only promoting upgrades, rather than promoting an upgrade-or-switch message.

Static HTML points out why you might want to put your effort into some other campaign instead. Because IE6 Countdown is only an upgrade campaign, and IE6 users are all on Windows XP or below (Vista ships with IE7), they can only ever upgrade as far as IE8. Given the huge gap between IE8 and IE9 in terms of standards support, HTML5, CSS3, and so forth, IE8 will soon become the new millstone around the web’s neck.

So instead of plugging IE, consider plugging your own favorite browser, be it Firefox, Chrome or Opera. Or perhaps plug another switch campaign. After all, there are quite a few alternative web browsers out there!

As usual, the first thing I tried after installing the Internet Explorer 9 beta last week was to see how it handled all of my websites. It does just fine with everything except this one. It shifts the header image off to the right. This is particularly odd because it’s just the standard Twenty-Ten theme that’s the default for WordPress 3, customized with one of my own photos.

Oddly, it was just fine in the last IE9 preview. Even stranger, the sample 2010 page looks just fine. It’s not my customizations, though. I’ve checked on two other locally-installed WP sites.

There’s a short discussion thread at the WordPress forums, and a bug report. As of today, it’s marked as fixed, but here’s the question:

Is it worth fixing in WordPress?

I haven’t found any indication as to whether this is a bug in the IE9 beta or a deliberate change. If it’s a deliberate change, it’s an odd one, because it takes behavior that used to be the same as every other web browser out there and changes it to something different. If it’s a bug in IE, though, that’s where it should be reported and fixed, not in just one of the sites affected.

That said, I’m probably going to try the workaround on at least one of my sites the next time I get on a machine with IE9.