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Comment by danielrhodes | Hacker News Reader

Most IE6 installations are in corporate environments where IT doesn't want to switch because it will break internal applications.

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I hear this claim floated a lot, and I largely believe it based on anecdotal evidence, but how do we know this is really true? Has someone done a study or have a meaningful way to measure it?

Work inside a large corporate and check the budgets for projects vs budget for IT maintenance. Upgrading browsers, as a project, has no board approvable ROI.

This will change when there are applications on the internet that corporates need, but can't access via IE6. See GWave for an example of how this can be resolved.

I think we may have to wait a fairly long while before companies will switch browsers just because of Google Wave.

Companies aren't getting onboard the usual sharing is caring experiece that most netizens are familiar with - they usually want to pay $$ to get a product (e.g. sharepoint) that provides some level of support rather than asking the users to be smart.

It may happen, but my bet is that internal net usage changes when the baby boomers have left the workplace and been replaced by people brought up in a very technological world.

I know of two enterprises (about 3000 to 3500) one and the other about 5000 hosts that still use IE6. The devs recently started using Firefox 3.0 (or something like that). Guess what their JRE/JVM version is? :-)

Edit: A quick way to verify this is to run your webserver logs through "whois" for clients with IE6.

That there are a lot of corporate users still using IE 6 is only part of the claim that that group makes up most of the IE 6 user base.

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