8 ms·
IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.
- Bootvis 15y agoI can't believe how happy this news makes me. I'm smiling ear to ear :>
- yuhong 15y agoIn fact, several countries made the list at around the same time: http://www.ie6countdown.com/champions.aspx http://www.ie6countdown.com/champions.aspx
- thibaut_barrere 15y agoFor those (like me) who still need to support IE6 for a while again, don't miss ievms (automated installation of IE in VirtualBox): https://github.com/xdissent/ievms https://github.com/xdissent/ievms (it recently added support for IE6)
- bjornsteffanson 15y agoI love these sorts of maps, but I noticed something unexpected that I'd never noticed before: Japan's IE6 usage is almost six times higher than in the US. For a country that I usually think of as "high-tech" (and the same place that gave us Ruby), that's not what I would've expected.
- eCa 15y agoWouldn't be surprised if the reason is similar to South Korea's: http://sietch.net/ViewNewsItem.aspx?NewsItemID=163 http://sietch.net/ViewNewsItem.aspx?NewsItemID=163
- bowyakka 15y agoSo cant we just support SEED in more modern browsers, look ma its a real specification it even has an RFC and everything :P Heck NSS supports it so Firefox and Chrome must be good for SEED (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839)
- tomjen3 15y agoGreat, we can use CSS3 transforms and Canvas now, right? Oh, we still have to kill 3 editions of IE and the xp operations system (too bad, it was pretty good).
- yuhong 15y agoYea, not only doesn't it support most of HTML5/CSS3, IE8 doesn't even support XHTML and also most of the DOM Level 2, both of which by now is more than ten years old!
- codesuela 15y ago3 ? 6 is dead 7&8 are still around and 9 is pretty decent. That leaves two more to go. I wonder if ten years from now IE 9 will take the place of IE 6 takes today...
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoMore likely the Android 2.2 or 2.3 browser.
- tadfisher 15y agoFriggin' RTL.
- tomjen3 15y agoBecause you need IE 10 for the transforms stuff. Perhaps the solution is to develop a flash replacement for the HTML5 elements that we can then force feed IE and all you have to do is include that script on a page to give your users a modern expericence, even if they have to be dragged into it.
- Samuel_Michon 15y agohttp://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/
- 15y ago
- Zirro 15y agoWill IE7 be the new IE6, or have most of IE7-users already upgraded to IE8 or higher?
- spydum 15y agoFor what it's worth, I suspect IE8 is going to stand out much more than IE7, which very few people will upgrade to (IE7 doesn't exist for Win7 I don't believe, so as people upgrade to Win7, you will see surge in IE8).
- ufo 15y agoIE8 will be the new IE6. IE9+ are the ones that only run on Windows 7.
- ams6110 15y agoBut nobody (we hope!) is writing IE specific apps anymore right? This is the whole reason IE6 is still around, because 10 years ago people WERE writing to IE. So I would suspect IE8 will have much less inertia.
- Zirro 15y agoI suspect it will be more about IE8's lack of support for CSS3 (and HTML5), meaning that we will have to keep bothering with various tricks and libraries to (partially) fix these for us.
- emehrkay 15y agoI'm not trying to troll, but is IEN really just IE6? Has 10 caught up to Webkit/Opera/Firefox? One of the main reasons I feel that why IEX will be IE6 is its lack of support for webGL
- Zirro 15y ago"Has 10 caught up to Webkit/Opera/Firefox?" In some areas, yes. In some areas, they're even ahead of the competition. Other areas still lack however, WebGL, as you mention is one of them. Sadly, their slow update-cycle means that whatever they release will soon lack the latest features that other browsers support.
- spydum 15y agoIn the enterprise space, IE6 usage has fallen significantly from Dec 2010 to Dec 2011 according to my own observations, but it's still not near enough zero for my own comfort: Dec 2009: IE 6.0 share is 37.3% Dec 2010: IE 6.0 share is 15.5% Dec 2011: IE 6.0 share is 6.8% Still, this is a great trend.
- spydum 15y agoand just for the rest of the IE figures from this particular site in the enterprise (sorry, not comfortable releasing actual session counts, all I can say it's in the hundreds of thousands of unique users): Dec 2009 IE6 Share: 37.3% IE7 Share: 32.8% IE8 Share: 13.9% Dec 2010 IE6 Share: 15.5% IE7 Share: 35.2% IE8 Share: 31.9% Dec 2011 IE6 Share: 6.8% IE7 Share: 24.3% IE8 Share: 43.5%
- ghshephard 15y agoIs this an internal web site, or one with a broad number of external enterprises (multiple companies) accessing it? More interesting in the latter case, less interesting if this is the internal wiki in some MegaCorp.
- spydum 15y agoExternal site, accessed by external companies. Granted, we only "support" the products on IE and Firefox, but the usage is still pretty varied, as they all mostly under other browsers.
- ROFISH 15y agoIt looks like IE6 and IE7 are just being dropped as that organization adopts Windows 7 for new hardware as old hardware gets triaged out whenever it breaks. Not that it's an entirely bad thing, but since IE8 is becoming more standard, wouldn't updating to IE9 be easier?
- dan85 15y agoWindows XP is still being supported by Microsoft (until April 2014). I think that IE8 is the most recent version of Internet Explorer which will ever work on Windows XP.
- botker 15y agoThis is the headline that so many of us fantasized about just a few years ago. The demise has been so slow that this barely feels like news. But with so many man-hours wasted on MSIE6 support, the headline's a legitimate cause for celebration.
- ams6110 15y agoThe thing is, it was only wasted by those who wanted to be cross-browser. If all you needed to do was work on IE6, there was no extra burden.
- botker 15y agoSure there was. IE6 support always required 2 to 3 times as much effort to support, compared with any other browser.
- ams6110 15y agoIf you didn't support any other browser, there by definition was no extra burden. In many enterprise shops you had IE and nothing else to worry about. I myself worked on apps where we only tested on IE because that's all the client used.
- botker 15y agoYou'd have been working half-days if the only browser you supported was anything other than MSIE6.
- ams6110 15y agoIn fact this isn't true, because one thing that IE did better than any other browser was scriptable async http calls and XML transformation with XSLT in the browser. At the time no other browser could do that. We were using javascript to get XML data from the server using the ActiveX XMLHTTP object, and transforming it client side with XSLT to generate HTML. This enabled filtering, sorting, and different presentations of data all client-side. This was hugely productive compared to imperative-style Response.Write HTML building, and at the time was only possible in IE.
- cnorgate 15y agoIt really depends on the type of customer you're targeting, but for most web apps and sites these days, I doubt someone still using IE6 is also a target customer for your service.
- blauwbilgorgel 15y agoI like how ie6countdown.com renders perfectly fine on both IE6 and modern browsers. I don't like how inaccessible HTML5 and CSS3 techniques are to older browsers. It reminds me of having to upgrade flash. I like how we try to make sites accessible for the blind, regardless of their usage stats. I don't like how we seem to throw away 1% of our best possible conversion rates, by fully ignoring 1% of our audiance. I like how the web is maturing and growing. I don't like how plain and simple information-providing websites are turning into HTML5 applications, with 100k's of javascript, hashtags and other dynamics. I believe that in 20 years, sites that were build to render on IE6, will continue to render just fine. Sites that were build using experimental browser vendor-specific code, with AJAX and hashtags might need a special server to render. Is that progress? EDIT: seems to be some confusion about "Sites build for IE6". I ment "Sites that render on IE6/were build with IE6 in mind". To me that doesn't auto-translate to active-x, MS-filters, conditional rules, IE7.js and CSS hacks, but I can see how others can view that. Anyway, I am clearly playing with fire, by taking these views on IE6. I'll just let this be and not delete it. It wasn't a troll or a flame, but this topic is always a heated one, so best to just let it be.
- ghshephard 15y agoI'm okay with newer pages not being viewable by browsers more than 10 years old. Upgrading your browser every half decade or so seems eminently reasonably, if only to ensure you get all of the security patches that are no longer being backported to EOL browsers. Of course, with browsers like chrome, they are auto-updating all the time anyways - so it's not like you have much of a choice. What is more important to me is that older web sites continue to be browseable (to some degree, bit perfect rendering isn't essential) 20 years from now.
- freehunter 15y ago>I don't like how inaccessible HTML5 and CSS3 techniques are to older browsers. Because these technologies came into existence after these browsers were made. Such is progress. >I like how we try to make sites accessible for the blind This is a law, and being blind is rarely a choice. >sites that were build to render on IE6, will continue to render just fine Because they were built with two codebases, one for regular browsers, one for IE6. Double the work for that 1%. >experimental browser vendor-specific code Browser specific code? Yes, if that code doesn't become standard. But IE6 required a lot of browser-specific code. The hopes are that the browser specific code gets the recognition for its usefulness and becomes part of the still-in-progress standard. >Is that progress? Yes.
- dangrossman 15y agoIt's still over 1% among the ~50,000 sites I track at W3Counter. That said, IE 6, 7 and 8 are all on a downward trend. If this keeps up two years from now virtually everyone will be on IE9/10, Chrome or Firefox. http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php & http://www.w3counter.com/trends http://www.w3counter.com/trends
- elchief 15y agoit seems to be a bit higher in china.
- skrebbel 15y ago> If this keeps up two years from now virtually everyone will be on IE9/10, Chrome or Firefox. And Opera.
- richthegeek 15y agoI like you, you're funny.
- skrebbel 15y agoHuh? The GGP talked about trends. Opera has been at a stable 1 - 2% for years now. Opera usage doesn't appear to be decreasing much at all.
- config_yml 15y agoI'm glad I don't have to maintain sites anymore which target the chinese market. IE 6 was a true pain point, but still, I've gained tons of knowledge on how to debug rendering issues.
- moomin 15y agoQuestion really is whether supporting it costs less than 1% of your total revenue. John Resig has said that very little of jQuery source is IE6-specific. That is to say, supporting IE7 and IE8 is a pain in the neck, and IE6 comes along for the ride.
- bad_user 15y agoWhich is why I don't understand the focus on IExplorer 6, as IE 7 is equally shitty and IE 8 is not that far behind.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cheald 15y agoMaybe in terms of Javascript, but IE has so many frustrating CSS bugs that aren't as bad in 7/8 that I draw a very clear mental distinction between them.
- nostrademons 15y agoAnother major point is testing & debugging. IE6 had a basically useless JS debugger. For IE7 & 8, you can at least use IE8's developer tools to pinpoint a bug and fix it (IE8 comes with IE7's rendering engine built in). With IE6, you're very often stuck looking at Fiddler dumps or binary-chopping lines out of your programming until you've pinpointed the error. Back when Google Search still supported IE6 as a first-class citizen, I found that very few lines of code were needed to make IE6 work. However, figuring out what those lines of code were could easily take more time than making it work in every other browser. Just the amount of time lost because I accidentally included a trailing comma made me want to throw my Windows laptop across the room.
- yuhong 15y agoIE6 did not ship a JS debugger at all, actually. You needed Microsoft Script Debugger or Visual Studio.
- jdc 15y agoFor perspective -- IE6 was released more than 10 years ago; its successor shipped 6 years ago.
- drawkbox 15y agoIt was Windows XP that led to this, and the failed Vista OS launch that took 5 years and noone upgraded. Now in Windows Update Microsoft will force an upgrade silently in the next few months to IE9/10. http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-start-automatic-upgrades-across-windows-xp-windows-vista-and-windows-7.aspx http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-...
- ck2 15y agoHa - I am part of the 1% for once (for testing, I even have WindowsME boxes). But seriously - who is making this claim - it's Microsoft, it's "political" embarrassment? I'd like to know what Google thinks from their user-agent logs. I bet a good chunk of IE6 user-agents are from bots too. But IE8 support is now the new "Netscape Navigator 4", admittedly not quite as bad.
- zacharycohn 15y agoThey sponsored the last Hacker News Seattle event and made a big announcement about it then. Everyone was pretty happy to hear, and it was a great time. Congrats Microsoft for spending so much effort phasing out an old product!
- blake8086 15y agoI wonder how much of that 1% is web developers testing to make sure things still work on IE6.
- randomdata 15y agoAnd bots. I notice in my logs, a number of bots report themselves as being IE6, when the behaviour is clearly not that of a normal user.
- djtriptych 15y agoHoly crap at 25% usage in China. Seems like someone would look at that and consider America's advanced usage of the web as a potential competitive advantage, rather than rush through legislation to hobble it.
- justindocanto 15y agoIs it true that IE6 has survived this long mostly due to a few 'go to' proprietary web based apps dependent on IE6 in the medical field? I've heard a few programmers repeat this. Curious if this is just misinformation being repeated. Anybody have knowledge on this?
- xxdiamondxx 15y agoThe State of Michigan is just now upgrading off of IE6. Maybe we were the difference!
- justindocanto 15y agoIf so, every programmer in america owes you a thank you basket... full of cash they saved from coding IE6 compatible code.
- nao921 15y agoit's about time to let ie6 RIP