And they are giving out free baseball bats to the rest of us too!

During the usual Monday morning warming-up/banter session at the ‘Claw, Max, who strolled in to studio today rocking a new head-crop, dropped this nugget on us: That fantastic IE6 Countdown page that we were all looking at the other day was done by Microsoft. Never spotted that and yes, we were aware of the “Download IE” button at the top, we just weren’t putting 2+2 together at that point.

What’s interesting here is obviously the timing, IE9 release candidate is out meaning general release is just around the corner. IE9 looks to be going up against a re-armed and firmly sexual Firefox4. Could this be a move to garner favour amongst the web community? Kill the thing we hate most and we may recommend you a bit more? Or could this be part of an aggressive marketing strategy to reach those who can, yet haven’t upgraded (see the segment of internet users that believe the internet is that little ‘e’ symbol).

Probably both, Microsoft need to be aggressive this time around as they continue to lose browser market share to Firefox & Chrome (who have been streaking up the share rankings) and with the new web buzzword ‘html5′ slowly starting to infiltrate the minds of the general public, Microsoft needs to show that they are ‘not only are in it to win it’ this generation but also that they have a browser capable of doing all this wonderful stuff that html5 is promising users (of course they are lagging behind FF4 and Chrome still, but you gotta give them credit for trying this time).

If you like the sound of this, get this article retweeted. Spread the word, we need to get this ghost, officially, busted.

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