IE6 – The End is Near | Hacker News Reader

IE6 – The End is Near

clubajax.org

21 pointsanm8tr17 comments

Not exactly. If you target designers and developers, you'll have much lower IE6 market share. If you target enterprise users trapped by a fearful and incompetent IT department, it'll be much higher.

We are stuck in an environment just like that. It's at least 5-10 years before all those are updated. The only hope is for the actual machines to fail and have to get replaced.

What a short-sighted article. People forget about the B2B enterprise world and those who service it.

People forget about the B2B enterprise world and those who service it.

Bob Martin[1] claims that was one of the reasons Smalltalk died[2].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Bob

2. http://blip.tv/file/2089545

I suppose, but the site I work with has a demographic of average women, hardly tech savvy, 25-65, and IE 6 users are only 5% or the 35% overall that use IE... under 2%. Even IE7 is at only 3% overall.

I think the only people using it in large numbers are employees of corporations with braindead CTOs.

Still, I'm not quite ready to ignore IE<8 altogether.

In near future, after IE9 has been launched, every major browser has (sort of) CSS3/HTML5 support. To prevent IE7 & IE8 becoming the new "IE6" for the next half decade, it's important to let them die. As a web developer, prefer graceful degration over pixel perfection. Let everybody access the content, but require a modern browser for eye-candy. People will upgrade (even corporations!), if they were not given another option.

IE6 usage is now below 5%? Wow, it's so cool to be part of such an exclusive club. Thanks Boss for keeping our organization on the bleeding (trailing) edge.

Depending on the kind of website you are making, you could ditch Internet Explorer 6 a long time ago.

Only three percent of all visitors used IE 6 when visiting a website for a academic conference (social science, German speaking countries) I made. Also, Firefox was nearly three times as popular as all versions of Internet Explorer combined. And that data is now already half a year old.

It's not only kind of website. There are also huge geographical differences.

I cringe whenever I hear "Opera has <1% market share (period)", because in my part of the world it has nearly 10%, and reaches 40% in some countries.

http://people.opera.com/dstorey/images/OperaMarketShareEE.sv...

Wow, a site with “Ajax” in its name that, on load, presents the user with a confirm() dialog that redirects them to the Flash install page? — while there is an unpatched critical zero-day bug being exploited in the wild? There is a reason I have Flash disabled!

(Also: My site, which is geared toward OS X users and web developers, has 2% IE6 traffic.)

Wow, it's down to 5% for us. Just 6 months ago it was 10% or so. Revenue from IE6 is just under 5% as well.

On a commerce website I help with, 6% of the visits in the last 30 days are IE6, which is 7% of the revenue. Those numbers are about 50% of what they were during the same period last year.

As an interesting note, the site still has a user on IE5.01 that orders every few months.

>the site still has a user on IE5.01 that orders every few months

Are they ordering new valves for their computer?

My wife works at some huge company, and is so forced to use IE6. Apparently Google Maps and many other useful websites don't work anymore and crash the browser (No, I didn't care enough to check :). So yes, the end really is near.

I heard that some companies actually like the fact that mainstream sites don't work in IE6 now, as it reduces the time employees spend fribbling around on the internet. Of course, anywhere competent would find a better way to screen traffic.

Govt site in the UK I deploy onto is still 18-13% depending on the area of the site. Education is a late bloomer.

For those who miss IE6 there is always http://ie6ify.com.

63% IE users on Woobius. about 11% of that (i.e. 6% of the total) are IE6 users.

Die, IE, die!

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