
Internet Explorer 6 Countdown - DanielRibeiro
http://www.ie6countdown.com/
======
oneandoneis2
You know, I'm moderately baffled by why MS persists in maintaining IE at all -
even IE 9 is considered "the problem child" by web devs trying to use shiny
New Things.

Why DO MS persist in maintaining their own browser when they're manifestly not
very good at it?

At the least, couldn't they make it easier all-round by following Google's
example and base IE off Webkit? Better standards compliance, cheaper
development, win-win surely?

Not a flame, I'm genuinely interested in why MS persist in (what seems to me
to be) flogging the dead horse of Internet Explorer.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Because there are a _lot_ of internal business apps dependent on it.

Many large businesses wrote applications using ActiveX, and still use them 10
years later. MS have promised support for all components of Windows XP until
2014, and that includes IE6.

~~~
xyzzyb
That explains why they still support IE6, but not why they developed IE7
through 9.

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Laremere
I think an interesting breakdown would be instead of counties, go by language.
China is bending the statistic so far that it's the only one above the world
wide average. It would be much more useful to know that if I were making a
website only in English how many users I could expect to use IE 6.

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blahedo
I remember being confused by this before, but don't remember the resolution:
how is it that we're supposed to interpret that ring chart on the lower right?
I think I understand the numbers written next to the countries on the ring
(namely, percent of ALL internet traffic represented by IE6 users in that
country—adding up to 6.3%, the number in the box on the upper right), but
those numbers don't correspond to the proportion of the ring.

EDIT: For instance, consider the US. 0.6% of US users use IE6 (from the map).
US usage is high, so that accounts for 1.3% of world internet traffic being
US-IE6 users, which would be a bit more than 1/5 of the IE6 users. But the US
segment of the ring chart is maybe 1/12 of the ring. What does that 1/12
correspond to?

~~~
infinity
This inaccuracy is a common problem with graphs and charts. The proprotions do
not match in this case. Maybe the ring has been designed by a designer,
constructed with old data, and now it is easy to change the numbers in the
graphic, but difficult to adjust the size of the ring segments? Or maybe
somebody has just forgotten to update the ring segments when the last update
of the numbers was made.

Sometimes fancy, but graphically inccurate, charts are used to cheat and
deceive, by representing small things larger or big things smaller. Putting a
pie chart in 3D can have the effect of altering the perceived information,
because if you're looking at the pie chart from above but slighly sideways,
the part of the chart closer to you may appear larger, and since you can
rotate the chart before rendering the final picture the choice of that part is
yours.

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joshschreuder
What is the reason behind IE6 usage still being so high in the PR of China?

~~~
cypherpunks01
Pirated XP installs: [http://micgadget.com/11633/why-the-chinese-still-favour-
inte...](http://micgadget.com/11633/why-the-chinese-still-favour-internet-
explorer-6/)

~~~
w1ntermute
Why isn't this nearly as big of a problem in India?

~~~
threepointone
pirated windows 7 installs?

~~~
Achshar
I can confirm, most users think of XP as pretty old now, and they usually need
win 7. The piracy condition is pretty bad, you get in store (like official
store) after seeing an ad for a laptop with Linux and walk out with win 7.
Consumers just don't care if OS cost is included in laptop price, they just
need the familiar start button, and if isn't there (in linux's case) they'll
be upset, which computer companies can't afford.

~~~
w1ntermute
> they just need the familiar start button, and if isn't there (in linux's
> case) they'll be upset, which computer companies can't afford.

I guess they'll be pretty upset when Windows 8 comes out then.

~~~
Achshar
Well yes and no. It is kind of easy to think that start button shifted a
little to the left and only shows up when you take mouse over it. Makes sense,
at least not alien as suddenly linux. Plus the windows, task-bar, control
panel, etc everything is same. Just a cover of metro start menu, which they
can completely ignore if they wish. I have been using win 8 as my primary OS
since it was released in beta, and i introduced my mom to it, she understood
basics of metro in a few minutes and never had a problem with it. Although she
is a computer operator at a school so she is a heavy computer users (as
compared to an average mom her age)

~~~
w1ntermute
Seems like she's the exception to the rule. From various videos posted on
YouTube of middle-aged and elderly people trying to navigate Windows 8, it
seems like the transition won't be quite so smooth for everybody.

That said, my parents have been using (Ubuntu) Linux for the last 5 years
without any problems at all. It's definitely reduced support calls from them
(no more crashes or viruses). They're still using the same old PCs from when I
first installed Ubuntu. When I visit them, I install a new LTS release, if
it's available (one's released every 2 years), a process that takes about 30
minutes of my active attention.

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josephcooney
Brought to you by Microsoft. Has any company ever worked harder to get people
to stop using one of its products?

~~~
nivla
>Has any company ever worked harder to get people to stop using one of its
products?

Wouldn't that be a compliment to the company???

~~~
josephcooney
I think it is great that Microsoft are working hard to try and get people to
move off a product that has passed its 'sell by' date (see obligatory
reference to the "IE6 is like old milk" campaign they ran
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/16/microsoft_rotten_mil...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/16/microsoft_rotten_milk_ie6_upgrade/)).

~~~
Piskvorrr
Yup. Jumping on the IE6 bandwagon when it's been an object of unanimous hate
for many years. Hey, any PR is good PR, right?

~~~
josephcooney
The 'milk' thing was 2 years ago. How long do they need to have been doing it
for it to not count as 'jumping on the band-wagon'?

~~~
Piskvorrr
Weeeeellll, IIRC, _this_ site launched as a part of IE 8 promo. That's been a
while - a whole new version of IE launched in the meantime. Pushing for IE7
eradication would be more appropriate nowadays.

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mariuz
anyone for a ie general countdown ? after the ie8
<http://theie8countdown.com/>

we can spread iex countdown <http://theie10countdown.com/>

~~~
yuhong
Not for every version. IE8 countdown is bit difficult at this point but
eventually will be worth the effort. I wouldn't bother with IE9 and IE10. In
fact, look at the font-face in the CSS, the only reason it fails in IE9 is
that they did not specify a WOFF version.

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jpswade
Chrome Frame is a really good way to gracefully migrate IE6 users to Google
Chrome.

<http://www.google.com/chromeframe/>

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iuguy
I think it would be good to be able to cross reference browser usage with OS
usage. For example, are people moving from IE6/XP to IE7/XP, IE9/Windows 7,
Safari/OSX, Chrome/Linux etc?

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FrancescoRizzi
6.3% (Worldwide). By now I was expecting some (serious, aka not ironic)
preservation effort to have started..

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accountswu
Am I the only one who thought that China (22.4%) was colored with the more
sharp orange shade that is associated with the >25% in the key? I actually
took a screenshot and copied the color box to confirm, the color of China is
lighter orange shade that's for the right range (20-25%).

~~~
pedrolll
Also, why is "unknown" almost the same colour as "1-5%"? To me it seems that
most of the world is unknown, including India, yet they still have statistics
for India. Confusing...

~~~
accountswu
Yeah, I don't know how they have stats for India, I didn't dig into the
sources.

