The lifespan of IE6

Read an interesting article this morning about the use of Internet Explorer. Specifically, the article suggests that now that IE8 is launched, users will migrate from IE7, but many who are still using IE6 will remain, to the point that IE6 will become more popular than IE7. Sound mad? Not really, because many corporate web applications were designed for IE6 when it was effectively the only browser available, and they won’t work with IE7. Larger companies tend to be intrinsically risk-averse anyway, upgrading a browser is low priority – my own experience certainly supports the argument.

A couple of sets of web stats highlight the issue. Looking at some stats from a large public sector website, 80% of visitors are using IE, of which 40% use IE6. This website will be frequently accessed by people at work. By contrast, one of the sites I run, which tends towards consumer usage, has only 60% IE users, of which only 15% use IE6

So the bad news is IE6 may live a lot longer than we might like…

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One response to “The lifespan of IE6”

  1. I know you’ve seen this before – http://www.ie6nomore.com/ …I just like testing your comment boxes.

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