Or one can hope.

With the beginning of any new month comes the release of new statistics, and on Tuesday, StatCounter released the new set of results for the browser market share war in May 2010 with quite surprising results.

As rightly Mashable pointed out, and was music to many people's ears, the market share for Internet Explorer 6 in the UK and United States was at an all time low, roughly 6%. Great news considering in 2003, IE6 held a 90% market share!

You may have noticed that the 6% market share is for the UK and US, what about the rest of the world? According to StatCounter, the worldwide market share for IE6 is still at 13.74%, which doesn't seem a lot in the scheme of things. However when compared to other popular browsers such as Firefox 3.5, which still only has a 12.42% market share, we come to the realisation that the end isn't here, yet.

Why do we want to see the end of Internet Explorer 6? What was great at the time of its release, is now old news and holding us back.

IE6 is not only full of security holes, but as a digital agency who strives for cross-browser compatibility, the browser definitely has its fair share of bugs in terms of code interpretation and lack of transparent PNG support.

Moving forward, we can use the statistics to say that supporting Internet Explorer 6 isn't as important as it was back in 2003. Support for this out-dated browser should be decided upon the audience of the website you are building.

If the website is lucky enough to have tracking statistics such as Google Analytics, you can begin to look at what browsers its users tend to use. Is only less than 1% of your users using Internet Explorer 6 to view your website? Great, consider not supporting it then.

So for us designers and developers who are too often pulling their hair out because of a bug with the design in IE6, dropping support is not quite here, but soon. Patience, there is light at the end of the tunnel.