If you visit the 2 websites
http://www.stopie6.org
http://www.bringdownie6.com
then it recommends explicitly IE 7 along with (and among) other possible choices (Firefox, Opera, Safari).

There are now many campains (I have bookmarked about 50!) to phase out IE 6 but a wide majority of them suggest/recommend IE 7 as a recommendable replacement: this is not coherent. If the top 2 reasons to stop using IE 6 is web standards compliance and security, then the replacement the user would go on to do should not have those top 2 problems… and IE 7 clearly has those top 2 problems!

IE 7 supports the hasLayout feature, has all of the margin collapsing bugs IE 6 had, has buggy float model implementation, clearance bugs, abs. and rel. positioning bugs, all of the left: auto offset, top: auto offset bugs IE 6 has, etc,etcet. So why would you recommend IE 7 as an acceptable replacement for IE 6?

Worse is that some sites do not hesitate to recommend to continue to patch webpages (and to continue to support specific markup code and CSS code patches targeting IE 6) so that they nevertheless continue to work in IE 6. You know, IE 6 users should find occasionally by themselves good motives to change or to upgrade. I’m not saying that IE 6 users should be intentionally annoyed here by dedicated webpage code targeting them.

Trash All IE Hacks
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/general/trash-all-ie-hacks/
is one rare site inviting people to drop IE hacks.

Interview with an Adware Author Jan 12th, 2009
philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware-author
is a good article to quote (judiciously) to convince IE 6 users to replace IE 6 (and again, not with IE 7!). Schneier did just that:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/interview_with_10.html

Creating a campain is one thing: creating one that is effective, justified and coherent is another.
Be logical and address the users’ intelligence are the ingredients often missing in those “stop using IE 6″ campains.

regards, Gérard

[previously mentioned but not linked]:
Internet Explorer 7: Still a security problem
http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2007/02/05/#ie-2007-bad , by David A. Wheeler

I installed it on my blog and it simply tells IE6 users to upgrade to Firefox (and provides a link for Firefox). It doesn’t tell them (if you don’t want it to) to upgrade to IE7.

I am against those campains for the following reasons:

1- they actively and positively promote IE 7 as a recommendable alternative browser to IE 6.
a) if IE 7 has 90% (or so) of all the bugs (spec violations, unsupported DOM interfaces, incorrect implementations, missing, incomplete support, broken support, etc), then why would anyone being logical and coherent want to promote and recommend IE 7?
b) IE 8 has fixed several hundreds of CSS 2.1 bugs when comparing with IE 7. Why those 2 websites (and any other websites promoting to replace IE 6 either with an upgrade or by switching to an alternate browser) are not actively promoting IE 8, instead of IE 7, as a more defendable, a more reasonable, a better, more sensible choice?
c) Ancient, outdated and old are qualificatives related to time and relative terms, not necessarly related to the crux of the matter here: web standards compliance and security. So, why are these 2 topics clearly addressed and clearly explained to the IE6 users/visitors?
d) “Ensure sites work in IE6″ is exactly a wrong way and one of the worse approach to entice people to upgrade or to switch. People should read reasons to switch or to upgrade their IE 6 browsers and people should occasionally (not necessarly intentionally) motives to switch or to upgrade their IE 6 browsers
e) According to David A. Wheeler in his “Internet Explorer 7: Still a security problem”, IE 7 is not recommendable… but those campains promote IE 7 … still in 2009! Someone is very wrong here.

Addressing the people’s intelligence, will to cooperate and addressing people’s objective best interests in this matter is the sure way, the most proactive, the best way to have people upgrade to IE 8 or to switch to latest released and stable versions of Firefox (v. 3.0.10) and Opera (v. 9.64). Those 2 campains are not doing this or not doing this well or sufficiently.

There are ways to meet the users’ perspective and understanding of the issues involved. Offering IE 7 as an acceptable, recommendable, viable and sensible choice is a very, very bad idea.
I personally found and reported 174 bugs in IE 7 (and I intentionally stopped at 174 because it really was not making any sense to search and report more bugs) and provided testcases (all reproducible, verifiable) for each of them and found several hundreds of sites were complaining about IE 7. So why would anyone being honest, coherent and consequent want to propose IE 7 as better for IE 6 users???

regards, Gérard