

IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S. - flardinois
http://siliconfilter.com/good-riddance-ie6-usage-falls-to-under-1-in-u-s/

======
thibaut_barrere
For those (like me) who still need to support IE6 for a while again, don't
miss ievms (automated installation of IE in VirtualBox):

<https://github.com/xdissent/ievms>

(it recently added support for IE6)

~~~
mrpollo
Great Project, thanks!

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spydum
In the enterprise space, IE6 usage has fallen significantly from Dec 2010 to
Dec 2011 according to my own observations, but it's still not near enough zero
for my own comfort:

    
    
      Dec 2009: IE 6.0 share is 37.3%
      Dec 2010: IE 6.0 share is 15.5%
      Dec 2011: IE 6.0 share is 6.8%
    
    

Still, this is a great trend.

~~~
spydum
and just for the rest of the IE figures from this particular site in the
enterprise (sorry, not comfortable releasing actual session counts, all I can
say it's in the hundreds of thousands of unique users):

    
    
      Dec 2009
      IE6 Share: 37.3%
      IE7 Share: 32.8%
      IE8 Share: 13.9%
      Dec 2010
      IE6 Share: 15.5%
      IE7 Share: 35.2%
      IE8 Share: 31.9%
      Dec 2011
      IE6 Share: 6.8%
      IE7 Share: 24.3%
      IE8 Share: 43.5%

~~~
ghshephard
Is this an internal web site, or one with a broad number of external
enterprises (multiple companies) accessing it?

More interesting in the latter case, less interesting if this is the internal
wiki in some MegaCorp.

~~~
spydum
External site, accessed by external companies. Granted, we only "support" the
products on IE and Firefox, but the usage is still pretty varied, as they all
mostly under other browsers.

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dangrossman
It's still over 1% among the ~50,000 sites I track at W3Counter. That said, IE
6, 7 and 8 are all on a downward trend.

If this keeps up two years from now virtually everyone will be on IE9/10,
Chrome or Firefox.

<http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php> & <http://www.w3counter.com/trends>

~~~
skrebbel
> _If this keeps up two years from now virtually everyone will be on IE9/10,
> Chrome or Firefox._

And Opera.

~~~
richthegeek
I like you, you're funny.

~~~
skrebbel
Huh? The GGP talked about trends. Opera has been at a stable 1 - 2% for years
now. Opera usage doesn't appear to be decreasing much at all.

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tomjen3
Great, we can use CSS3 transforms and Canvas now, right?

Oh, we still have to kill 3 editions of IE and the xp operations system (too
bad, it was pretty good).

~~~
codesuela
3 ? 6 is dead 7&8 are still around and 9 is pretty decent. That leaves two
more to go. I wonder if ten years from now IE 9 will take the place of IE 6
takes today...

~~~
ROFISH
Nope, IE 8 will take the spot of where IE 6 is currently. It's the default
browser of Windows 7 whereas one currently needs to update to IE 9.

The best hope to get rid of IE 8 is the same thing that killed IE 6 for good:
popularity for the recent version of Windows. If Vista didn't falter the way
it did, we would have had less time on IE 6, due to adoption of Vista's
preinstalled IE 7.

~~~
yuhong
More importantly IE8 is the latest that can be installed on XP.

------
moomin
Question really is whether supporting it costs less than 1% of your total
revenue. John Resig has said that very little of jQuery source is
IE6-specific. That is to say, supporting IE7 and IE8 is a pain in the neck,
and IE6 comes along for the ride.

~~~
bad_user
Which is why I don't understand the focus on IExplorer 6, as IE 7 is equally
shitty and IE 8 is not that far behind.

~~~
nostrademons
Another major point is testing & debugging. IE6 had a basically useless JS
debugger. For IE7 & 8, you can at least use IE8's developer tools to pinpoint
a bug and fix it (IE8 comes with IE7's rendering engine built in). With IE6,
you're very often stuck looking at Fiddler dumps or binary-chopping lines out
of your programming until you've pinpointed the error.

Back when Google Search still supported IE6 as a first-class citizen, I found
that very few _lines of code_ were needed to make IE6 work. However, _figuring
out what those lines of code were_ could easily take more time than making it
work in every other browser. Just the amount of time lost because I
accidentally included a trailing comma made me want to throw my Windows laptop
across the room.

~~~
yuhong
IE6 did not ship a JS debugger at all, actually. You needed Microsoft Script
Debugger or Visual Studio.

------
blauwbilgorgel
I like how ie6countdown.com renders perfectly fine on both IE6 and modern
browsers.

I don't like how inaccessible HTML5 and CSS3 techniques are to older browsers.
It reminds me of having to upgrade flash.

I like how we try to make sites accessible for the blind, regardless of their
usage stats.

I don't like how we seem to throw away 1% of our best possible conversion
rates, by fully ignoring 1% of our audiance.

I like how the web is maturing and growing.

I don't like how plain and simple information-providing websites are turning
into HTML5 applications, with 100k's of javascript, hashtags and other
dynamics.

I believe that in 20 years, sites that were build to render on IE6, will
continue to render just fine. Sites that were build using experimental browser
vendor-specific code, with AJAX and hashtags might need a special server to
render. Is that progress?

EDIT: seems to be some confusion about "Sites build for IE6". I ment "Sites
that render on IE6/were build with IE6 in mind". To me that doesn't auto-
translate to active-x, MS-filters, conditional rules, IE7.js and CSS hacks,
but I can see how others can view that. Anyway, I am clearly playing with
fire, by taking these views on IE6. I'll just let this be and not delete it.
It wasn't a troll or a flame, but this topic is always a heated one, so best
to just let it be.

~~~
recursive
You like sites designed for IE6, but don't like vendor-specific code? Does not
compute.

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
Perhaps because I didn't say nor mean both those things. Perhaps also because
your parser mistranslates "sites designed for IE6" as "sites using MS-specific
code".

------
blake8086
I wonder how much of that 1% is web developers testing to make sure things
still work on IE6.

~~~
randomdata
And bots. I notice in my logs, a number of bots report themselves as being
IE6, when the behaviour is clearly not that of a normal user.

------
ck2
Ha - I am part of the 1% for once (for testing, I even have WindowsME boxes).

But seriously - who is making this claim - it's Microsoft, it's "political"
embarrassment?

I'd like to know what Google thinks from their user-agent logs.

I bet a good chunk of IE6 user-agents are from bots too.

But IE8 support is now the new "Netscape Navigator 4", admittedly not quite as
bad.

------
jdc
For perspective -- IE6 was released more than 10 years ago; its successor
shipped 6 years ago.

~~~
drawkbox
It was Windows XP that led to this, and the failed Vista OS launch that took 5
years and noone upgraded. Now in Windows Update Microsoft will force an
upgrade silently in the next few months to IE9/10.
[http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-
to-...](http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-start-
automatic-upgrades-across-windows-xp-windows-vista-and-windows-7.aspx)

------
zacharycohn
They sponsored the last Hacker News Seattle event and made a big announcement
about it then. Everyone was pretty happy to hear, and it was a great time.

Congrats Microsoft for spending so much effort phasing out an old product!

------
Zirro
Will IE7 be the new IE6, or have most of IE7-users already upgraded to IE8 or
higher?

~~~
slowpoke
What I actually fear to become the new IE6 is Firefox 3.6 (and 4, to a
degree). I've seen and talked to an unholy amount of people who flat out
_refuse_ to upgrade to the newest stable release, either because they assume
(or have been told) that their add-ons will no longer work[1], or because they
- for whatever reason - think the new release modell is bullshit[2]. I've
rarely come across a reason that really wasn't just either (sometimes willing)
disinformation or flat out bullshit.

[1] Which is stupid considering that the overwhelming majority of add-ons need
exactly one fix, and that's the version check, which can be disabled with the
Compatibility Reporter add-on.

[2] And then proceed to switch to Chrome. Oh the irony.

~~~
melling
FF 3.6 is at 4% and dropping. People simply won't have a choice but to upgrade
once market share gets low enough because developers will stop supporting it.
Google will probably stop this year.

Switch to another browser if you don't like the new FF.

~~~
drgath
"Google will probably stop this year."

I'd assume you are talking about Google search? No they won't. 100% guarantee
you Google will still support FF3.6, just like Google does, and always will
always support IE6. jQuery, YUI, and all the JS libraries will always support
IE6 as well. You should never go to any of these major sites and see JS errors
& major rendering flaws in legacy browsers. If you do, that is just careless.

The reason I bring it up is because there is a biiiiiiiiig middle-ground of
"support", and developers who don't realize this, need to. Legacy users don't
need, and shouldn't expect the same experiences, but they still need support.
You are still talking about Web browsers here. The Web doesn't have versions.

~~~
melling
Google Apps: Gmail, Docs, etc.

[http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-
support-m...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support-
modern-browsers.html)

[Update]

Firefox 3.6 is already unsupported.

[http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=3...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33864)

~~~
drgath
I know. If you are talking about some of the most advanced apps Google
develops, I'm sure they will cease supporting FF10 & Chrome 20 at some point
this year.

I prefaced my post by saying "I'd assume you are talking about Google search?"

------
bjornsteffanson
I love these sorts of maps, but I noticed something unexpected that I'd never
noticed before: Japan's IE6 usage is almost six times higher than in the US.

For a country that I usually think of as "high-tech" (and the same place that
gave us Ruby), that's not what I would've expected.

~~~
eCa
Wouldn't be surprised if the reason is similar to South Korea's:

<http://sietch.net/ViewNewsItem.aspx?NewsItemID=163>

~~~
bowyakka
So cant we just support SEED in more modern browsers, look ma its a real
specification it even has an RFC and everything :P

Heck NSS supports it so Firefox and Chrome must be good for SEED
(<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839>)

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justindocanto
Is it true that IE6 has survived this long mostly due to a few 'go to'
proprietary web based apps dependent on IE6 in the medical field? I've heard a
few programmers repeat this. Curious if this is just misinformation being
repeated.

Anybody have knowledge on this?

~~~
xxdiamondxx
The State of Michigan is just now upgrading off of IE6. Maybe we were the
difference!

~~~
justindocanto
If so, every programmer in america owes you a thank you basket... full of cash
they saved from coding IE6 compatible code.

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botker
This is the headline that so many of us fantasized about just a few years ago.
The demise has been so slow that this barely feels like news. But with so many
man-hours wasted on MSIE6 support, the headline's a legitimate cause for
celebration.

~~~
ams6110
The thing is, it was only wasted by those who wanted to be cross-browser. If
all you needed to do was work on IE6, there was no extra burden.

~~~
botker
Sure there was. IE6 support always required 2 to 3 times as much effort to
support, compared with any other browser.

~~~
ams6110
If you didn't support any other browser, there by definition was no extra
burden. In many enterprise shops you had IE and nothing else to worry about. I
myself worked on apps where we only tested on IE because that's all the client
used.

~~~
botker
You'd have been working half-days if the only browser you supported was
anything other than MSIE6.

~~~
ams6110
In fact this isn't true, because one thing that IE did better than any other
browser was scriptable async http calls and XML transformation with XSLT in
the browser. At the time no other browser could do that. We were using
javascript to get XML data from the server using the ActiveX XMLHTTP object,
and transforming it client side with XSLT to generate HTML. This enabled
filtering, sorting, and different presentations of data all client-side. This
was hugely productive compared to imperative-style Response.Write HTML
building, and at the time was only possible in IE.

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djtriptych
Holy crap at 25% usage in China.

Seems like someone would look at that and consider America's advanced usage of
the web as a potential competitive advantage, rather than rush through
legislation to hobble it.

~~~
vogonj
not to ruin it for you, but IE 6 usage is so high in China because China has a
bunch of pirated XP SP0/SP1 installs; IE 7/8 is XPSP2+ only, and IE 9 is
Vista+ only.

this same piracy is why the Business Software Alliance was originally a SOPA
supporter.

------
config_yml
I'm glad I don't have to maintain sites anymore which target the chinese
market.

IE 6 was a true pain point, but still, I've gained tons of knowledge on how to
debug rendering issues.

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yuhong
In fact, several countries made the list at around the same time:
<http://www.ie6countdown.com/champions.aspx>

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cnorgate
It really depends on the type of customer you're targeting, but for most web
apps and sites these days, I doubt someone still using IE6 is also a target
customer for your service.

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Bootvis
I can't believe how happy this news makes me. I'm smiling ear to ear :>

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nao921
it's about time to let ie6 RIP

