While there’s been a massive web-based campaign against the continued use of Microsoft’s long dated Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft has now announced that it will be supporting IE6 until 2014.

Recently, sites as big as YouTube have joined the campaign to drop support for IE6 and it had been hoped that Microsoft would do so too, driving uptake of its more recent Internet Explorers 7 and 8. Instead though, the BBC is reporting that Microsoft has announced an extended lifespan for IE8 that will be sure to make many web developers’ skins crawl. What is perhaps most intriguing isn’t the decision to extend its life, but the frankness with which Microsoft approached the whole discussion.

The general manager for Internet Explorer, Amy Barzdukas, is quoted as having said, “Friends do not let friends use IE6. If you are in my social set and I have been to your house for dinner, you are not using IE6.” While that’s all great, to see that Microsoft’s staff has the right attitude, the fact is that there is still a significant number of businesses for whom IE6 is the primary browser.

Of course, the problem for Microsoft is that if it sits down and tells a vast number of customers that they should consider an upgrade, options like Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome start to look very attractive. If you’re going to be changing browsers anyway, why not check out some of the competition? It’s all free at the point of use anyway.

Regardless of what you think about the whole IE6 fiasco, you should check out the article over at the BBC, which goes into an awful lot of detail about the almost inexplicably fast rise of the anti-IE6 campaign, the threat to Microsoft posed by other browsers and just how we, as users, should feel about the whole affair. You can read it here.