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.