Sites like this one beg a question: How widespread is the use of IE6 really? The answer is hard to come by so rather than providing statistics on a world-wide basis I’ll give you a look behind the curtain of the 12 or so sites I’m running on my server. The sites target a multitude of different audiences, from hard core techies to programmers and designers to stay at home housemothers - in other words a pretty wide range of the population.
To see what kind of penetration IE6 has I ran stats on all my sites combined for the last 12 months. The results are quite telling.
As the pie chart at the beginning of this article shows, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 is used over 60% of the time and Internet Explorer 6 alone is used by a full 29% of the visitors. More surprisingly, the outdated Firefox 2 browser holds a full 7% while the excellent Opera browser is pretty much non-existant.
But no matter how you slice it, close to 30% of my visitors use IE6 - and that’s 30% too many. In effect it means that a full 30% of the visitors to the sites I host are getting an inferior experience and may encounter problems while they are visiting the sites.
So, if you wonder why people work so hard to get rid of the old browser, there’s the answer for you.
Can you tell what proportion of those are people using Windows 2000, 98 or Me, none of which can be upgraded to IE7? Those users will need moving to Firefox 2 (FF3 requires XP) or Opera.
Interesting question. I’ll run some more stats to check this out.