August 27, 2011 is the 10th anniversary of Internet Explorer 6. Back in those days, ten years ago this software was one of the best technological achievements ever accomplished by mankind.
An important milestone has been reached that day and we should give this epic web browser a credit. But what do we have now? Ten years have passed and now we can observe how technologies can make a monster from a harmless old school web browser. I’m not trying to protect IE6 and I know how many problems it brings to web developers. It is obvious that it should have been abandoned by the world 5-6 years ago and left only in museums. But reality is cruel, because of the fact this browser hasn't been abandoned the Internet today is not as good as it could have been.
There is a massive media campaign concerning the process of dropping support for IE6. Many respectful and influential web projects have already done that – remember a social media wave of delightful admiration about WordPress 3.2 without IE6 and other similar events? Even Microsoft is trying to fight its own child and has created a website called IE6countdown where you can track online data concerning IE6 usage all over the world. What is interesting that China has the highest percentage of IE6 usage – 30.5%. That’s absolutely unbelievable considering China’s population and the number of Internet users there. Other countries are not as "advanced" in this field, but some still do have over 4% of IE6 usage.
Also on that website you can find a small code snippet which can be added to your website’s header, the point is every time the user will browse your website via IE6 there will be a message displayed informing a person that they should update their web browser immediately. We assume that it is very useful project aimed at saving hours of work for web developers and website owners as well as making the web a better and a safer place for browsing.
Today, even though Internet Explorer has lost its leading positions in the browsers race, it is too early to claim it as an outsider on the field. Strong 20% and more is not a bad result at all for the company whose product was proclaimed to be the worst browser in the history of the web. Here are some major stats about Browser usage statistics in 2011 by months.
2011 was one of the most successful years for IE6 haters because we can observe how drastically IE6's share has decreased over this year. The following chart shows us the recent data about IE versions' usage and we can state the fact that IE6 is almost dead now. Soon all web developers all over the world will be able to celebrate the victory over the Goliath of the web.
Looks like everything is going pretty well and soon Internet Explorer 6 will be forgotten, but hey - that's not that much of a surprise for us all, right? What does matter now is what will happen to Internet Explorer 7? I mean there is a chance that this software may also become a target that must be terminated right after its elder brother. On one hand, IE7 is not as bad as the previous version, but on the other hand it does have a lot of negative sides which cause so much headache with the HTML markup validation and the new CSS features. We also don't know what will happen, but we're dying to know your opinion. We've decided to ask your thoughts on this and here is our Internet Explorer Versions Survey that would like you to take. Please take a couple of minutes to complete our survey and help us all find out the facts. Very soon we will publish results of this research and will keep the discussion going. Also, feel free to express your opinion on this topic in the comments section to this post.