It’s not every day that a company cuts a cake and sends out commemorative souvenirs in honor of one of its products falling into obscurity, but that’s exactly what Microsoft has done — celebrating the decline of Internet Explorer 6 to less than 1 percent of the U.S. browser market.

Above is the cake that the company used to mark the occasion internally, and at right are the shirt and coffee mug that GeekWire and other tech news sites received in the mail today. (We’ll be giving ours away as a prize on an upcoming episode of the GeekWire radio show and podcast.)

“We hope this means more developers and IT Pros can consider IE6 a ‘low-priority’ at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser,” writes  Roger Capriotti, director of Internet Explorer marketing, in a blog post marking the occasion.

It’s part of the company’s recent effort to rid the world of the browser, which was first released 10 years ago, in the Windows XP era. After the long hiatus that followed IE6’s release, Microsoft has come out with three new versions, significantly improving the security of the browser and working to support modern web standards.

The company still has some work to do to rid the world of IE6. Microsoft’s IE6 countdown site shows Internet Explorer at 7.7 percent market share worldwide.

Previously on GeekWire: As IE falls overall, Microsoft touts IE9 gains on Windows 7

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