For those (like me) who still need to support IE6 for a while again, don't miss ievms (automated installation of IE in VirtualBox):<p><a href="https://github.com/xdissent/ievms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/xdissent/ievms</a><p>(it recently added support for IE6)
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:<p><pre><code> 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%
</code></pre>
Still, this is a great trend.
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.<p>If this keeps up two years from now virtually everyone will be on IE9/10, Chrome or Firefox.<p><a href="http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php</a> & <a href="http://www.w3counter.com/trends" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3counter.com/trends</a>
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.
I like how ie6countdown.com renders perfectly fine on both IE6 and modern browsers.<p>I don't like how inaccessible HTML5 and CSS3 techniques are to older browsers. It reminds me of having to upgrade flash.<p>I like how we try to make sites accessible for the blind, regardless of their usage stats.<p>I don't like how we seem to throw away 1% of our best possible conversion rates, by fully ignoring 1% of our audiance.<p>I like how the web is maturing and growing.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
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.<p>Congrats Microsoft for spending so much effort phasing out an old product!
Great, we can use CSS3 transforms and Canvas now, right?<p>Oh, we still have to kill 3 editions of IE and the xp operations system (too bad, it was pretty good).
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Anybody have knowledge on this?
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.
Holy crap at 25% usage in China.<p>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.
In fact, several countries made the list at around the same time:
<a href="http://www.ie6countdown.com/champions.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.ie6countdown.com/champions.aspx</a>
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.
I'm glad I don't have to maintain sites anymore which target the chinese market.<p>IE 6 was a true pain point, but still, I've gained tons of knowledge on how to debug rendering issues.
Ha - I am part of the 1% for once (for testing, I even have WindowsME boxes).<p>But seriously - who is making this claim - it's Microsoft, it's "political" embarrassment?<p>I'd like to know what Google thinks from their user-agent logs.<p>I bet a good chunk of IE6 user-agents are from bots too.<p>But IE8 support is now the new "Netscape Navigator 4", admittedly not quite as bad.