You must use Internet Explorer at work: visual proof from Google Analytics | Hacker News Reader

You must use Internet Explorer at work: visual proof from Google Analytics

clemesha.posterous.com

35 pointsclemesha17 comments

My website (whirlpool.net.au) sees IE6 account for 2.3% of traffic on weekdays and 0.9% on weekends.

Combining all versions of internet explorer together, the figures are 28% and 23%, respectively.

The only browser with a greater-than-expected boost on the weekend is Safari, but only by a very small margin compared to the increase seen by Firefox and Chrome.

All figures from GA.

Track.com gets 33% IE, only 13% of which is 6.0 (so about 4% total), 22% 7.0, 64% 8.0, and just under 1% 9.0. And most of our customers are financial institutions, who I wouldn't expect to be on the cutting edge.

We actually get more people using Opera Mini (presumably Blackberry users) than we do IE6 users.

kudos to you sir, whirlpool is great! (and it has no ads)

This is why no sane commercial site can drop support for IE6. The people left using it largely have no choice.

But is it really IE6? The site doesn't break it down by browser version, so it could be 7 or 8, which have relatively better standards support.

I'm not at liberty to share our GA data right now, but we see it for IE 6 especially. IE 6 is about 5% of our total traffic and it looks like the vast majority are people at work.

Hmm, that seems to imply that IE6 is finally going away.

Unfortunately we have to wait for ie 9 to get access to the nice stuff.

It is, but slowly. Are you willing to turn away 5% of your customers?

If it saves you X% of time developing, yes. And some of those 5% can probably use portable Chrome/Firefox/etc.

Are they customers?

One site I'm aware of asked a somewhat different question. They mapped the browsers of the visitors that were buying and how much each bought, and found a completely different answer.

Though the site saw a higher percentage of IE than what was discussed here, the data showed the IE users weren't their customers. FF, Opera, Chrome and Safari all bought more and bought bigger than IE.

For us, every user who visits the site is a customer, since we make money from ads.

If they give me expenses for more than 5%, then yes.

In reality they will properly just have to do without the rounded borders, gradients, and nice picture frames that requires working css.

Yeah I consider graceful failback to be supporting IE6. I'm talking about the sites that just don't work at all in IE6.

So only 2.5% are forced to use IE (drops around 50% during the weekend). The other 2.5% are users who will upgrade when they can't play farmville anymore.

Took a closer look at the numbers. In general our traffic goes down by about 20% on the weekend. For IE6 it goes down by 63% on the weekend. For IE as a whole it goes down by 30% on the weekend.

Or it could be that there's a lot of not-very computer/Internet savvy people using the application during the week, and that their browser of choice is IE.

What is the scale? These graphs are useless without magnitude.

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