log

February 20, 2009

The IE6 resistance

(Clean­ing up an unfin­ished-post queue, for those won­der­ing. This one’s a lit­tle skimpy but sta­tis­tics are always fun.)

A while back I held a small work­shop at TAFE on brows­er usage and the impor­tance of ver­i­fy­ing designs in mul­ti­ple browsers. Lucky I don’t get sick of com­plain­ing about IE6; even now, sev­en years after its release, mar­ket share keeps it on our test­ing matrix:

• IE6: ~36%
• IE7: ~32%
• Fire­fox: ~19%
• Safari: ~3%
• Opera: ~2%

(Stats tal­lied from sev­er­al pub­lic sources late last year)

Of course these stats are a rough aver­age from sev­er­al sources wide­ly vary­ing demo­graph­ics (and the num­bers don’t even add up to 100%).

One of the few seri­ous ben­e­fits of MS’s Vista push is IE6 being errad­i­cat­ed in its wake. XP’s lat­est ser­vice pack still does­n’t include IE7 though — they must be fac­ing off with a lot of cor­po­rate intranet admins whose busi­ness soft­ware still depends on IE6 Javascript bugs.

Curi­ous­ly, Microsoft will be ‘push­ing’ IE8 to Vista and XP via OEM chan­nels (think Dell) as an option­al com­po­nent. Maybe web devs should start peti­tion­ing OEMs to enable it by default? Imag­ine writ­ing only one stylesheet per website.