How many IE6 users are real users?

Question

I'm supporting an existing website and IE6 suppport seems to come up given the amount of rich AJAX and other technology sprinkled into the solution. IE6 is definitely going the way of the dinosaur, however the people who operate the site insist that 20% of Internet users are still rolling with IE6.

My question is this: how many of the 20% are real domestic US IE6 users? A great number of these people hitting with IE6 strike me as being out of country running illegal installs of Windows XP ineligible for Windows Update. I say this because I've travelled the world quite a bit and used cafes all around where this is the case. Do anyone have any real hard numbers for recent domestic US IE6 numbers?

Regards.

Answer 1

At last count on W3Schools, IE6 users made up slightly less than 10% of the global web population. (As the commenters rightly point out, these statistics are based on visitors to a web development site, so you can expect it to be somewhat biased, although the numbers for IE6 here are very similar to the other sites.)

In the US, IE6 users make up about 6% of the traffic.

Here is one more site that tracks browser usage across thirty thousand or so sites. IE6 is currently used by slightly less than 10% of internet users on these sites.

Answer 2

You're forgetting locked-in corporate users and people with old systems. If you don't care about those users, either (foreign users are real users), you can safely ignore them, I guess.

Answer 3

Numbers using IE6 are going to depend heavily on your specific site. it's certainly possible for IE6 usage to be very low but for your specific site to have a high percentage of users on IE6.

General browser stats can be found here but it's much more important to get figures on your own specific sites under your control when making any kind of browser support decisions.

Answer 4

Believe it or not, I have some Government customers that by IT policy are prohibited from upgrading past IE6 on their workstation "because IE7 is too insecure."

I sh*t you not.

Answer 5

If by "real" users you mean actual humans and not bots and scripts I don't have any hard and fast figures, but I would suggest that the proportion of "bots" or "non-real" users to "real" users is probably going to be similar across the spectrum of popular browsers and therefore something that you can totally discount when looking at your proportion of IE6 users.

If by "real" you mean "people who have actually paid for Windows XP and up"; honestly, unless you're Microsoft or are very concerned about the morals of software piracy, I wouldn't factor it into my decision of whether or not to drop support for IE6.

Myself, I cannot wait until the day I can drop support for IE6. I'm not going to totally drop support though - just let a few things slide and some functionality drop off gracefully. At the moment I'm sitting around 10% - after taking a massive drop in the last 6 months. Once I hit 5% (which I'm estimating will be around the end of the year) I'm going to start rolling down support. Which is great news because that's around the time we're doing the website redesign.