I am a self-confessed addict to statistics. I won’t lie
So when someone mentioned the latest “kill IE6” campaign I thought it would be interesting to have a look at browser stats for a couple of the sites that we run
- Our main site (and its various offshoots)
- Irish ISP Test
Irish ISP Test
Over the last 30 days the site has had just under 90 thousand page views
The browser breakdown shows that Internet Explorer is “top dog”, with just over 52% of visitors, with Firefox at just under 35%
What about versions?
IE8 accounted for just under 48%, IE7 just under 40%, while IE6 still had nearly 13%!
Compare that to our main site…
Main Blacknight Site
Not surprisingly the visitor profile for our site is quite different.
Firefox is “top dog” this time round, with just under 48%, with Internet Explorer in second place at 33.5%
Checking the versions of Internet Explorer reveals that IE7 is the most popular version, followed by IE8, with IE6 coming 3rd (9%)
So while there are still a lot of people using IE6 (and IE5!) both IE7 and IE8 are definitely becoming more widespread (at least among the users who visit the two sites mentioned).
If you are a Microsoft Windows user upgrading to IE8 isn’t that arduous!
I’m not sure if these “kill IE6” campaigns are a good idea or not.
While I understand that IE6 maybe awkward to code for I also don’t like developers denying me access to websites based on my browser version, so if you are going to code for newer versions of Internet Explorer please don’t block older ones – let people still access the site, but encourage them gently to upgrade.
