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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

We build websites for organisations in the UK who do a lot of work with the NHS, and we regularly still see ~10% visits from IE11 in Google Analytics. Organisations that don’t work with the NHS consistently show < 2%, so although I don’t have conclusive proof I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on for us.

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I wonder how much of a sampling bias there is. It's plausible to me that users of non-IE11 browsers are more likely to be using ad/tracking blockers which block Google Analytics. That could skew the relative population of "users who ran Google Analytics" towards more IE11 users.

Were you able to use other sources than Google Analytics to look at the browser population? I imagine working with the NHS that things like HTTP access logs are harder to wrangle (if they exist at all)

For clarity, we don't build websites for NHS bodies, we build sites for some external organisations that work with the NHS, so logs would be relatively easy if it felt worth it. GA is my only source, but my hunch is that use of blockers is pretty consistent across clients whose visitors are mostly from businesses or institutions, and I see this differential across those audiences. Having spoken to people who work in the NHS Digital team there are definitely pockets of IE use, although it's been getting better - the shift sped up quite a bit after the Wannacry attack.

I work on an NHS focused web app, if it's pockets they're pretty deep ones.

We have basic first party analytics of the NHS users of our software (mainly just browser versions actually), and it's probably a little over half of them are using IE11 still. My impression from talking to some of them is that most of them now have both Chrome and IE11 available on their machines, and it's just which one they're using. I'm sure that's uniform everywhere though.

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