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Computerworld - An online petition calling for British government agencies to drop Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been launched on the official site of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The petition, which as of midday Tuesday had more than 3,700 signatures, asks Brown to "encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6" because it is vulnerable to attack and requires Web developers to specially craft sites that support the quirky browser.

"When the U.K. government does this, most of Europe will follow. That will create some pressure on the U.S. to do so, too," stated the petition's creator, Dan Frydman, the managing director of Inigo Media, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based Web design firm.

Calls for IE6's demise have been ongoing for at least a year, but have recently intensified. Last week, Google announced that it would stop supporting IE6 on Google Docs starting March 1, and would also drop support for the almost-nine-year-old browser as an editing tool for Google Sites.

The anti-IE6 momentum has also been fueled by attacks that struck Google, Adobe and dozens of other Western companies. Those attacks, which in Google's case successfully infiltrated the corporate network and made off with company secrets, exploited a then-unpatched vulnerability in IE6. As news of the bug spread, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, known by its German initials of BSI, and France's CERTA each urged citizens to dump IE6.

Microsoft issued an emergency IE update Jan. 21 to patch the exploited vulnerability, as well as seven others.

Today, Frydman said that all those elements played a part in his decision to petition the prime minister. "If we didn't have to deal with IE6 when we built Web sites, the work would be quicker and the projects would be less complicated," Frydman said in an interview. "So that's a selfish reason. But we've been moaning about IE for years."

It was the combination of the IE vulnerability, the urging by German and French authorities to drop IE6 and Google's decision to stop supporting the old browser that prompted him to create the petition, which was approved and posted to the Number10.gov.uk site yesterday.

Another contributing factor, said Frydman, was the U.K.'s Department of Health recommendation last week to the National Health Services (NHS), the country's publicly-funded healthcare services, that it replace IE6 on PCs running Windows 2000 or Windows XP with the newer IE7.

"All those things came together," Frydman said.

Even Microsoft has joined the anti-IE6 campaign, although it has said it cannot force users to abandon the browser, noting that it's promised to support IE6 until April 2014. "Microsoft has consistently recommended that consumers upgrade to the latest version of our browser," a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail today. "While we recommend Internet Explorer 8 to all customers, we understand we have a number of corporate customers for whom broad deployment of new technologies across their desktops requires more planning."