Microsoft has celebrated the imminent demise of version 6 of its Internet Explorer browser by baking a cake. The software giant held the light-hearted celebration as it revealed that the program was used by less than 1% of US internet surfers. It is keen to kill off the old version of the browser and persuade users to move to IE8 or 9. Over at Microsoft headquarters, the mood was more upbeat. “Time to pop open the champagne because based on the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usages in the US has now officially dropped below 1%,” blogged Roger Capriotti, Microsoft’s director of Internet Explorer marketing. “We hope this means more developers and IT pros can consider IE6 a ‘low priority’ at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser,” he added. “I think it was rated one of the worst software products of all time by one tech magazine at the time of its release,” he said. The browser was plagued by security issues which has its own knock-on effect, he thinks. Industry watchers have predicted that despite Google’s current marketing woes, Chrome could overtake IE as the leading global browser in 2012. If you are using Internet Explorer in your laptop or PC please upgrade to the latest version. The older versions had so many security issues. Better still switch to Chrome. It is faster and you can type your Google query in the browser window itself instead of going to Google and typing the keywords. Makes life a bit easier.