from Hacker News

IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.

by flardinois on 1/3/12, 6:47 PM with 87 comments

  • by thibaut_barrere on 1/3/12, 7:19 PM

    For 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

    (it recently added support for IE6)

  • by spydum on 1/3/12, 7:34 PM

    In 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.

  • by dangrossman on 1/3/12, 7:46 PM

    It'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/trends

  • by moomin on 1/3/12, 7:55 PM

    Question 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.

  • by blauwbilgorgel on 1/3/12, 7:42 PM

    I 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.

  • by blake8086 on 1/3/12, 10:50 PM

    I wonder how much of that 1% is web developers testing to make sure things still work on IE6.

  • by jdc on 1/3/12, 9:08 PM

    For perspective -- IE6 was released more than 10 years ago; its successor shipped 6 years ago.

  • by Zirro on 1/3/12, 7:34 PM

    Will IE7 be the new IE6, or have most of IE7-users already upgraded to IE8 or higher?

  • by zacharycohn on 1/3/12, 10:35 PM

    They 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!

  • by tomjen3 on 1/3/12, 7:29 PM

    Great, 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).

  • by bjornsteffanson on 1/3/12, 7:24 PM

    I 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.

  • by justindocanto on 1/4/12, 6:26 AM

    Is 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?

  • by botker on 1/3/12, 7:39 PM

    This 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.

  • by djtriptych on 1/3/12, 11:26 PM

    Holy 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.

  • by yuhong on 1/3/12, 7:18 PM

    In fact, several countries made the list at around the same time: http://www.ie6countdown.com/champions.aspx

  • by cnorgate on 1/3/12, 7:42 PM

    It 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.

  • by config_yml on 1/3/12, 7:48 PM

    I'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.

  • by Bootvis on 1/3/12, 7:12 PM

    I can't believe how happy this news makes me. I'm smiling ear to ear :>

  • by ck2 on 1/3/12, 9:11 PM

    Ha - 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.

  • by nao921 on 1/4/12, 2:14 PM

    it's about time to let ie6 RIP