Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] Is the New IE6 | Hacker News Reader

Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] Is the New IE6

paulirish.com

22 pointsamaks20 comments

(2011). But still relevant. Here's a more recent comparison of version adoption rates from ArsTechnica: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/window...

Or as an album of just the charts: http://imgur.com/a/3UM4J

Can you really blame Microsoft here?

The slow rate of ie adoption is from corporate users who are reluctant to update more frequently because of the risk of breaking their internal applications. If this was any other browser I am guessing the chart would have looked the same.

Isn't IE now silently auto-updating by default, just like Chrome?

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/12/micros...

Hopefully that will address much of the problem.

Microsoft apparently can't do that because of all those corporate customers which depend on subtle behaviors of a particular IE version they have apps developed against. This is a vicious cycle. Auto-update would work if it was the case from the very beginning.

Sure they can - just like chrome and FF can: you just add an option to turn it off. IE has that option already.

Interesting. So, perhaps, it's because IE update usually requires OS restart and Administrative privileges when Chrome for example doesn't.

I think they provide "blocker toolkits" with registry keys so Windows Update offers security updates for the current version of IE instead (all versions of IE follows the support lifecycle of the Windows version it is installed on).

Is IE11 even out for windows 8? I hope IE will truly auto-update one day, but I'll believe it when I see it.

It can't auto update like Chrome because it updates files in system32. Generally it uses the same Windows Update used for all other Windows updates.

>Windows XP still accounts for 46.6% of Windows users

And yet it's suppose to be retired in ~6 months.

EDIT: Newer data isn't so bad. XP accounts for between 20%[1] and 10%[2] marketshare today.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201210-201310

[2] https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOper...

> [Published] SEP 27TH, 2011

See my edit. I only realized this was published in 2011 after reading the comments.

Yup!

Don't forget server versions of Windows. Server 2003's IE6 is going to be supported until 2015 and Server 2008's IE7 is going to be supported until 2020. And worst of all, Server 2012's IE10 is going to be supported until 2023 and can't be upgraded to IE11 without upgrading to R2.

Do people generally surf from Windows Server though? Or run webapps using Windows Server? I could see someone using Windows Server to go to a website and download a file needed for the server, but that should only affect roughly no one. If your website supports SMB or enterprise customers and your downloads aren't accessible on even IE6, you're massively misjudging your audience (and putting too much into your web development).

I agree that terminal server is the most common usage.

It would be interesting if someone published the 'effective browser technology guide' which defined the set of things that would look the same on all browsers. It might end up with just CSS2 and tables though :-(

http://caniuse.com/ is pretty good for that.

That is a fantastic resource that every web developer should be aware of.

But it can't tell you if things will look the same, and it only goes back as far as ie8.

Examples:

http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/doubled-margin.... http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/floatIndent.htm...

FYI, if you click "Show all versions" in CanIUse it goes back all the way, to IE 5.5, FF 2.0, etc.

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