Death to IE6!
A site I’m building at the moment has required me to consider the poor people who still unfortunately use Internet Explorer 6. I’d love to think it was a thing of the past, extinct along with any pre-XP versions of Windows and late 90’s pop music but unfortunately not.
As we all know, Firefox is steaming ahead at the moment. The latest release of FF3 has been a huge success and considering the fact that it doesn’t come installed by default on Windows or Mac, the latest official browser usage statistics claim it to be nearly twice as popular as Internet Explorer 7.
Now, any web designer knows the hours of headaches and broken office equipment that come from cross-browser compatibility issues. Any decent developer will use Firefox as a primary browser and mosey over to IE, Opera, Safari and whatever else takes their fancy to ensure that every user gets a fair deal.
Back in the day of Firefox 1 and IE5/6… this was a problem. A huge problem. Then Firefox took the lead and started pushing ahead, showing IE how it’s really done. Ever since IE has been crawling along behind, falling at hurdle after hurdle. For such an immensely huge organisation like Microsoft – it’s damn embarrassing.
When Internet Explorer 7 came along, there was a ray of hope for web designers/developers. For the majority it renders .png transparency (although still with dirty activeX hacks) fine, doesn’t do a bad job of understanding CSS2 and has tabbed browsing, oooh!
I’ve got to be honest, I’d began to ignore IE6. In fact pretty much every website I’ve built in the last year, I’ve never checked in with IE6. I don’t have the time and most of my freelance clients don’t have the budget. Plus, no-one even uses IE6 anymore…. do they?
The other day I took a painful look at the lastest browser usage stats from W3C. As well as Firefox may be doing, IE still holds the lead with a combination of IE6 and 7. To my dismay, IE6 is still in general use by over a quarter of web users… I couldn’t believe it. And if you don’t, take a look for yourself.
Web Usage Statistics taken from W3C website:
Browser Statistics Month by Month
| 2008 | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Fx | Moz | S | O |
| May | 26.5% | 27.3% | 0.7% | 39.8% | 0.7% | 2.4% | 1.5% |
| April | 24.9% | 28.9% | 1.0% | 39.1% | 0.9% | 2.2% | 1.4% |
| March | 23.3% | 29.5% | 1.1% | 37.0% | 1.1% | 2.1% | 1.4% |
| February | 22.7% | 30.7% | 1.3% | 36.5% | 1.2% | 2.0% | 1.4% |
| January | 21.2% | 32.0% | 1.5% | 36.4% | 1.3% | 1.9% | 1.4% |
| 2007 | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Fx | Moz | S | O |
| December | 21.0% | 33.2% | 1.7% | 36.3% | 1.4% | 1.7% | 1.4% |
| November | 20.8% | 33.6% | 1.6% | 36.3% | 1.2% | 1.8% | 1.6% |
| October | 20.7% | 34.5% | 1.5% | 36.0% | 1.3% | 1.7% | 1.6% |
| September | 20.8% | 34.9% | 1.5% | 35.4% | 1.2% | 1.6% | 1.5% |
| August | 20.5% | 35.7% | 1.5% | 34.9% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.7% |
| July | 20.1% | 36.9% | 1.5% | 34.5% | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.9% |
| June | 19.7% | 37.3% | 1.5% | 34.0% | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.8% |
| May | 19.2% | 38.1% | 1.6% | 33.7% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.7% |
| April | 19.1% | 38.4% | 1.7% | 32.9% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.6% |
| March | 18.0% | 38.7% | 2.0% | 31.8% | 1.3% | 1.6% | 1.6% |
| February | 16.4% | 39.8% | 2.5% | 31.2% | 1.4% | 1.7% | 1.5% |
| January | 13.3% | 42.3% | 3.0% | 31.0% | 1.5% | 1.7% | 1.5% |
| 2006 | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Fx | Moz | N7/8 | O |
| November | 7.1% | 49.9% | 3.6% | 29.9% | 2.5% | 0.2% | 1.5% |
| September | 2.5% | 55.6% | 4.0% | 27.3% | 2.3% | 0.4% | 1.6% |
| July | 1.9% | 56.3% | 4.2% | 25.5% | 2.3% | 0.4% | 1.4% |
| May | 1.1% | 57.4% | 4.5% | 25.7% | 2.3% | 0.3% | 1.5% |
| March | 0.6% | 58.8% | 5.3% | 24.5% | 2.4% | 0.5% | 1.5% |
| January | 0.2% | 60.3% | 5.5% | 25.0% | 3.1% | 0.5% | 1.6% |
| 2005 | IE6 | IE5 | Fx | Moz | N7 | O8 | O7 |
| November | 62.7% | 6.2% | 23.6% | 2.8% | 0.4% | 1.3% | 0.2% |
| September | 69.8% | 5.7% | 18.0% | 2.5% | 0.4% | 1.0% | 0.2% |
| July | 67.9% | 5.9% | 19.8% | 2.6% | 0.5% | 0.8% | 0.4% |
| May | 64.8% | 6.8% | 21.0% | 3.1% | 0.7% | 0.7% | 0.6% |
| March | 63.6% | 8.9% | 18.9% | 3.3% | 1.0% | 0.3% | 1.6% |
| January | 64.8% | 9.7% | 16.6% | 3.4% | 1.1% | 1.9% | |
So, IE6 is not dead and buried yet. And it will most probably still be a while until that’s the case. Huge office networks, a majority of XP machines and people who just don’t care to upgrade will still be plagued by inconsistent page layouts, grey blocks where there should be transparency and poorly rendered text, slow browsing and just pain, pain, pain.
The rest of the web design world is moving on. We have FF2 and 3, IE7 and soon IE8 plus all the other top browsers out there (the new Opera is rumoured to be impressive, however I’ve not yet tried it). How long can we go, still trying to cater for such a multitude of browsers as well as mobile devices and while trying to maintain semantic, accessible code.
Death to IE6, Death to IE6!
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Darren T said:
Couldn’t agree more. Useless piece of standards non-compliant heap of nasty, junk software that it is…
Tetsuo said:
I find it surprising that you’ve never checked sites in IE6, and I’m even more surprised that you felt “no-one even uses IE6 anymore”.
Those stats aren’t from the W3C (as you stated), but acutally just from W3Schools visitor logs. That around %40 of their users (typically developers or students) are using Firefox isn’t that unusal, but I very much disagree with your assumption that Firefox is “steaming ahead at the moment”.
Although I can’t give concrete details (hey, who can?) the general consensus is that Firefox currently has something like 10-20% market share (though this is slowly improving). Internet Explorer dominants with between 70-80% of worldwide browser usage, and you can roughly split that down the middle when it comes to IE6 and IE7 users (with IE7 slowly inching ahead as time goes by)
nathan said:
@Tetsuo
Thanks for the input, I quite like it when stats are proved wrong, but regardless – my point still stands. Of course it’s just an opinion (one of which is shared among most) but that’s a key point behind blogs.
To all, I apologise for my misconceptions, does this however change the way you feel about the current browser usage situation?
lukas said:
Of course it does not.
You can only get a real and right number using tools like google analytics on the very page you are developing. There are some blogs on which the majority user uses Safari, so if it works in Firefox and IE6, this blog still looses.
In case of market share, I found some different statistics.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2
This would give IE 70% (IE 6 “only” 22% and IE 7 47%, so nothing with 50/50).