Browser statistics and Internet Explorer 6 usage

9 January 2009

Six months ago, I collated browser usage statistics for a personal website and reported that Internet Explorer 6 hangs on. I have repeated the exercise for the six months ending 10th December 2008 and here’s my update. The overall summary is that IE6 usage is still quite high and is only showing a slow decline.

Firstly, the website in question gets about 5000 unique visitors per month so I am not claiming that these figures are in any way representative of general usage. However, I am using the figures to try and assess when I can start adding some advanced CSS methods to this [and other] websites.

Note: All the figures were obtained using Google Analytics.

Overall, as expected, Internet Explorer is the most popular browser with 79.5% [a slight decline compared with six months ago], followed by Firefox with 13.6% [a small increase], and then Safari with nearly 5%. Google Chrome usage is not significant yet but that’s unsurprising because it was only released in the middle of my six-month period.

Pie chart showing browser version usage

For Internet Explorer versions, the IE6 usage shows a decrease from 38.8% last time to 32.1% now. IE7 usage has increased from 61% to 67.6% [almost the same as the decline in IE6].

Pie chart showing IE6 and IE7 usage

These figures show that the decline in IE6 usage is still slow. At this rate it will be another two or three years before IE6 usage drops to near zero! It’s all rather depressing considering that IE6 was released in 2001.

Perhaps the imminent release of Internet Explorer 8 will persuade a few IE6 users to jump straight to the new version? I hope that corporate IT departments who remain on IE6 do the same thing.

Please… let’s put IE6 to rest.

Note: The figures for the last few weeks since December 10th show that IE6 usage has now dipped below 30%.

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Comments

  1. Amen! It is my biggest headache as a designer to have to accommodate the clumsy and horrible IE6. It’s a shame that it’s still used so significantly. W3’s statistics show that just over 19% of web browsers are still on IE6 as of December 2008. Eeek!


    · mz    21 January 2009, 15:28    1

  2. Disappointingly, our corporate site has received almost the same stats. We also have 32% (of IE users) still clinging on to IE6. Overall we’re getting around 250,000 unique visitors a month, so it’s a fairly accurate picture. I agree with the author, once IE 8 is given the hard push there might be a rapid decline in usage, but until then we’ll have to resort to all manner of hacks.


    · Andrew    25 February 2009, 22:39    2
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