Every time I’m writing new HTML&CSS I check google analytics to see what browsers our users are using. I do this so I can determine what browsers must be supported and if Internet Explorer 6 is, by any chance, dead yet. This is, annoyingly, still not the case (I shall be very drunk when that day comes). IE6 still has, on one of our web pages, 47.30% share between different IE versions (IE7 trails it closely with 47,06%). Overall IE holds a 48.54% share, Firefox is second with 47,09% and Chrome is third with 1,90%. So no surprises here, except maybe for Chrome which beats Opera and Safari. The power of Google brand is amazing.
What I did find interesting is how IE6&7 share changes during the week. On weekends IE7 has a bigger share then IE6, whereas during the week IE6 leads. And here lies the main problem why IE6 is still hanging around. You see, most of IE6 users come from various government agencies and departments (ministries, schools, town halls, …) and big companies. They usually don’t upgrade because they use custom web applications that refuse to work on anything else other than IE6. The other main reason is that system administrators (in companies mostly) can’t justify the upgrade to the bosses or are just plain ignorant and don’t bother. So that is why IE7 gains, although slightly, over IE6 during the weekend, because users who surf the internet during work with IE6 go home and use something more modern.
This disturbs me greatly, because I don’t know how this will change anytime soon and we, webmasters, will have to support IE6 (if we don’t want to loose customers that is) for a long time. Off course there are other reasons for this mess we are in. Most users are regular Joe’s who haven’t got a clue about computers and they usually don’t even know they are using a browser, they just “surf the web”, so we can’t expect them to upgrade anytime soon. How could they? They don’t even know that there is something wrong with what they are using. And Microsoft is to blame here. They ware simply not aggressive enough when they released IE7, they should have pushed IE7 as a critical update that would install automatically without user intervention (they could exclude companies from this so that sys admins could confirm the install) and they should have launched a broader media campaign, like they are doing now with IE8.
