The is a common claim, but has anyone actually researched this? Is there any evidence that this is still true? It's my understanding that most of the IE6 market share is in Asia, where many people are running pirated versions of XP.
The problem is that a few years ago Microsoft pushed Windows Genuine Advantage updates automatically via Windows Update (they might even have done this twice), with the result that all those pirated versions of XP turned off Windows Update forever and never installing anything from microsoft.com.
Oops.
You're criticizing MS for not pushing updates to pirated versions of their software?
The marginal cost of sending updates to pirated machines is probably negligible, and pirates adapted to WGA within a couple weeks.
So – they managed to convert a few Western users who didn't know they were running a pirated copy. I would place a good bet that the total volume of pirated licenses remained the same, though.
More recent experiments have shown that piracy is really more about customer service than straight up cost [0]. As a result, we have large hordes of unpatched machines that are easy to convert into zombies and running outdated software the rest of us have to support.
[0] http://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economic...
Why would you support outdated software only used by pirates? Just don't support it to force the pirates to update.
I regularly pay for stuff on the internet (domains, hosting, invoicing apps, ios apps, etc. etc.) as long as Paypal is supported (we cannot use credit cards to make international payments).
You need to support as many people as possible with your webapp, you never know who your customer is.
Do we really, though? If the boxes running IE6 are in Asia and elsewhere in the developing world, how many of us really need to develop for them? I can't think of many websites that need to cater to Chinese pirates.
I know our competition works the same way, as does pretty much the whole government services sector. That's a few million employees in the U.S. alone.
Anyway, there's enough non-IE6 work to do that I generally refuse to write any IE6 code (and when I do, I don't spend more than a minute or two copy-pasting some conditional comment found via Google.)
Why a Motorola Razr instead of an iPhone 4S? Because the latter didn't exist. When IE6 came out more than a decade ago, it was the absolute best browser available. In 2004 when XP SP2 came out, it cleaned up a lot of reliability and security issues. You just have to look at IE6 with a 2001-based lens and realize what the alternatives were at the time.
IE6 was good enough to become the standard for slow-moving corporate types, and they're sticking with it. The every-few-weeks upgrades of Chrome and (now) Firefox are way too fast for them.
A lot of these big companies will stay with IE6 till the bitter end in 2014, when free XP support (security patches) goes away. I wouldn't put it past some of them to pay for XP support rather than switch to another OS, or to negotiate extended XP support into their Microsoft upgrade contracts.
This survey from 2007 (I know it's old now) showed 55.2% of corporations used IE6. I'm pretty sure it is one of the sources of the "big companies use IE6" claim. http://www.dailytech.com/Firefox+Makes+Big+Gains+In+Business...
And here's a newer poll showing 29% of respondents use IE6 at work with "no end in sight" http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/03/it-poll-do-yo...
What I have found is that the IT guys in China compile many "recovery disk" with a pirated copy of Windows that people use to reinstall their OS. A lot of these disks are XP-based, but more people are running Window 7 now.
Lastly, several Chinese companies have developed their own version of browsers. I haven't really looked into what kind of rendering engine they run, but they appear to be some kind of rebranded IE. Does anyone have the scoop on this?
Still, new consumer machines often have Windows 7 installed, from what I've seen, so things are moving forward. I don't have any numbers though.
I did see Chrome installed as well so that might be their solution :)
IE 6 holds a 1% market share in the US. How many corporations in the US are mandating IE 6 if it's only got a 1% market share?
You'll also note that IE 6 has a nearly 28% market share in China. Now, this doesn't say that these are pirated installs, but they are obviously XP or older, and this is clearly where the bulk of IE 6 market share is.
If you rarely or never go on the actual internet, the fact that you're using an old browser doesn't matter any more than if you're using an old native program to do the same things.
Of course, there is still the issue of people who do go on the internet but don't visit any of the sites that actually track these statistics; however, I don't know how much of an issue this is because I don't know which sites do the tracking.
>IE 6 holds a 1% market share in the US. How many corporations in the US are mandating IE 6 if it's only got a 1% market share?
While the points you've made are valid they are irreverent to the discussion at hand.