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Comment by statictype | Hacker News Reader

This is great. It's going to take big and popular sites like Youtube and Facebook to finally kill of IE6.

Except most IE6 installs are in corporate environments, which most likely already block youtube and facebook, so it won't really change anything.

Now if we could get Sun, IBM, and Google to all swear off IE6, maybe some IT departments would grudgingly update to IE7.

I believe it's a myth that "most" IE6 are corporate environments. The diagrams about IE6 work day-weekend fluctuation wasn't that big.

I expect at least half of the active IE6 users to be users of the category "installed Win XP and doesn't care about updates or browsers". At least I know some people like this.

Corporate laptops make no distinction of work days. Digg's recent survey shows that a most of their users who are on IE 6 are so because of work.

http://blog.digg.com/?p=878

There are also a lot of bots that label themselves as IE 6 which inflates the effect.

Digg's recent survey shows that a most of their users who are on IE 6 _[and are interested in completing a survey about what browser they use]_ are so because of work.

If someone is already in the aforementioned "installed Win XP and doesn't care about updates or browsers" category, I think it's pretty safe to assume they might be in the "doesn't want to be bother with a survey about their browser" category.

Also, the people who are not upgrading their browsers (mostly because they are not technologically savvy) are not frequenting websites like YouTube and Facebook. My grandfather doesn't know what Facebook is and is definitely still running IE6 (even though I tried to get him onto Firefox)!

do him a service and at least upgrade to IE8, it also does wonders if you just replace his 'internet' icon with a browser thats more recent, he'll never know the difference but will thank you later that he can watch videos of his grandsons on youtube.

The largest IE6 population work wise is the US Government and they have little to no intention of upgrading to anything else anytime soon.

I'm currently stuck in the hell of developing web applications for government contracts that are targeted to IE6. For example... No multi css class support in IE6, which kills lots of JS libs. Horrible stuff.

You MIGHT be right, but I do web application development for government, and I was recently surprised when my new laptop was delivered with IE8 on the standard image.

For this particular agency, EDS is their GSS provider, so if EDS is incorporating IE8 into their ESA image, I wouldn't expect that it's too far off at other agencies they provide general support services for.

Of course, now I've got to make all the apps I've written work in IE6 AND IE8, alongside Firefox, which they're also piloting. I'm pleased at their progress, while staying wary of all the work it's going to bring my way.

That's promising to hear. I worked IT for a large government contractor for years and it often took long amounts of time to roll out new images to the whole company. Considering the average lease time of 3 years, a full IE8 rollout could certainly take time.

I was especially surprised to hear about the piloting of Firefox. Is there a site somewhere to keep up on technology rollouts across the different US Gov't agencies? Or at least the ones EDS provides support for?

It's probably 'sensitive' information, as knowledge of the underlying tech gives the bad guys a guide on what to target, or at least that would be the ISSO friendly answer.

I don't know of anything that trends across gov, but if you had tie-ins with DOD, they'd probably give you the answer for that, as most of the other agencies I've dealt with sort of fall in line with them.

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