And from a startup point of view, legacy IE means Enterprises, Enterprise means big price tags:<p>1) Because they are Enterprises.<p>2) Because nobody wants to support those browsers.<p>If you think it's a declining market that'll be dead in 18 months, we have contracts to support IE 6 until 2019, not to mention 7 and 8.
The title needs an asterisk. Because I unfortunately have the privilege of knowing an older gentleman that purposely uses IE6 on Windows XP. He calls the concept of tabs useless rubbish. And I'm not talking a regular consumer, I'm talking someone who develops actual software.
As a non-choice user of IE6, I can confirm that this is annoying.<p>Especially when articles about old versions of IE don't render in the browser.
Please retitle to "30-40% of IE users use older versions of Internet Explorer by choice."<p>[derp. updated the numbers because I was being stupid, but the point still stands]
It would be so fun if there's some leak mentioning the role of "legacy software" in facilitating information acquisition by government agencies (or other interested parties).<p>Like using LM Hashes for "backwards compatibility" or older, more easily exploitable browsers.
I think a lot of people just don't know enough to upgrade their browser - I see people using IE9 at work even though we are allowed to install whatever software we want...<p>IE really needs silent auto-update, and to actually release more often...
I once worked for an organization that had a handful of small customers holding on to older browsers and operating systems. They represented <1% of our customer base and an even smaller % of our transaction volume.<p>But this was a government-contracted non-profit and it couldn't just write them off as customers. So the organization decided it would be cheaper to help these customers upgrade their legacy operating system, browser and enterprise apps then to continue to try and remain reasonably compliant with their browser.
It would be cool to further break this down by time of day. i.e. look at people who use IE8 from 9-5 on weekdays vs. the weekends. Because I bet nighttime weekday IE8 usage dampens the effect.
We are seeing the same thing at <a href="https://starthq.com" rel="nofollow">https://starthq.com</a>. We've been getting a disproportionate amount of traffic from IE gallery as a result of being the most recently featured pinned site for the past 6 weeks in the US: <a href="http://www.iegallery.com/PinnedSites" rel="nofollow">http://www.iegallery.com/PinnedSites</a><p>There are a few other patterns we've spotted about IE users:<p>They're older - we can deduce this from the the fact that many include their year of birth in their email address.<p>They're less tech savvy, we see people typing in in all caps, using the search as it wasn't intended - and we've actually had a few get in touch via the feedback form asking for tech support.<p>Also the conversion rate from visitor to sign up user is consistently 3x that of Chrome.
I really hope IE6 is not in use in governments anywhere in the USA because it is not FIPS compliant and therefore not hipaa legal. Which is a huge no-no and risks very private information.<p>A few major lawsuits for major $$$ might solve that problem.
It's been my (unfortunate) experience that most enterprise / corporate environments lock down users machines heavily in the name of security. And with that goes the ability of the user to upgrade their browser. Oftentimes the reason is that there are old internal web applications which don't work in newer versions of IE / look rubbish in newer versions of IE. It's a pain. And it looks like the death of XP won't mean the death of IE 8 as many Win 7 shops are resisting the upgrade to IE 9 let alone 10.
In a big corporation I used IE for all intranet sites (because those crappy sites simply couldn't be rendered properly in any other browser) and Firefox for the world web. Why not do like this?
I've written[1] about this trend way back in June of 2009. The drop wasn't as dramatic as it is now, but it was certainly there. We have (fortunately) come a long way since then.<p>It's also funny reading how Chrome had a 1.9% share at that time, and how I found it amazing :)<p>[1] <a href="http://hancic.info/ie6-is-dead-over-the-weekend" rel="nofollow">http://hancic.info/ie6-is-dead-over-the-weekend</a>
I definitely see this trend with a web app (game) of mine. Here's some screenshots of Google Analytics that show exactly this behavior: <a href="http://www.clemesha.org/blog/You-must-use-Internet-Explorer-at-work/" rel="nofollow">http://www.clemesha.org/blog/You-must-use-Internet-Explorer-...</a>
Can't wait when Windows XP finally gets dumped by MS. I suspect a nightmare for a lot of companies and lots of crying towards MS. I hope they don't change their decision to drop XP next year.
Have to agree with conclusion, right now I'm using IE8 and not voluntarily! What's really interessting are the multiple "you are using an old browser" messages you get.
This isn't just a corporate phenomenon, state and local governments use IE 8 almost exclusively. There are a lot of bored government workers browsing the web on IE 8 during the week.
I wonder whether the total numbers are significantly lower on the weekends - i.e. if there's a selection bias going on for people who choose to use the internet.