How long do you think IE6 will survive?

Question

I am pretty sick of IE6, would not want to support it anymore. When do you think its market share will decline to, say, 5%?

Answer 1

At least 5 years.

If you consider IE5 still has a bit of a share these days and because of the bad press of vista some people wont bother to upgrade thier computers for a while.

Lets face it, Joe Average will be upgraded to IE7 when he upgrades his pc most of the time.

Just keep your hacks for IE in seperate files using conditional comments and roll with it, remember it's not the consumers fault they are on a bad browser so dont punish them for it.

Answer 2

This is not a programming question. Please close this as fast as you can.

Answering your question, IE6 will sink to oblivion slowly, very slowly. Many corporate bullies are still clinging to IE6 as their choice, and many old systems work only in IE6.

Answer 3

It is going to be a long time until it sinks below 5%. I don't think you should ignore a browser with less than 5% market share, though. That would mean that you are already ignoring Safari?

At the moment IE6 is used by about 16% of my website's users. It would have to fall well below 2% before we would even consider dropping support for it.

If I were to ignore browsers, or even OSes, I would have to drop support for both Mac and Linux, as well as Safari and Opera.

I bet you will have to struggle with IE6 for at least a few more years.

Answer 4

Same here of the IE users about 30% still use IE, so about 14% overal usage, I still get hits from IE 5.5 :-(

Answer 5

For new sites I've found that sending IE6 the mobile stylesheet instead of the full version gives decent results with less hair-pulling.

Answer 6

I think most of the corporate world is moving towards IE7 now. I installed IE7 once and used it for some time. But IE6 is way too cool and ancient to let go of.

Answer 7

remember it's not the consumers fault they are on a bad browser so dont punish them for it.

I disagree. It is the consumers fault. There are many alternatives IE. If you have XP, you can upgrade to IE7, no need to get Vista. There's also Firefox available freely to everyone. As well as Opera. If you're still stuck on Windows 98, Firefox 2 is miles ahead of IE6, and works on Windows 98. Catering to people won't give them any incentive to change, and it will just make the decline of IE6 drag on way longer than anybody wants it to. Personally I believe people should make sites functional in IE6, but not waste time on CSS and stuff, and getting it to look perfect, and then just display a message letting them know why their experience is so bad, and pointing to the alternatives. This doesn't work in all business cases, but I think the more sites that do this, the faster the transition will be.