Posted on Jun-22-2008
Waiting for IE6 to die.
Every month without fail I check the w3schools.com browser usage statistics page to see how much IE6 usage share has declined.
IE6 usage is is slowly dropping, however because of the poor response to Microsoft’s less that popular Vista OS, IE6 is dieing a slow slow death.
Current usage of IE 6 is 27.3% of all web browsers with IE7 coming in at 26.5% and FireFox at 39.8%.
Each month it is dropping at just a little over 1% meaning it will still be over a year before developers can consider dropping support for IE6. In desperation I checked my Analytics in the vein hope that IE6 users were concentrated in another part of the world and don’t hit my sites at all. Somewhere like Ecuador. Not the case. The blue section in the graph below represents IE6 users.
So why do I care? Anyone who has developed a site and gone through the cross browser testing process knows how painful IE6 can be. There is a list of well know bugs including the IE6 box model bug and probably most notably the lack of native support for alpha transparent PNGs. Just last week I spent a whole night trying to iron out IE6 bugs in a transparent image roll over on a clients site.
Hopefully the recent release of Mozilla Firefox 3 will speed up IE6’s decline 
