Hallelujah! IE6 Usage Falls Below 5% In The US
According to StatCounter via TechCrunch, IE6 market share has dropped below 5% in the US, while IE8 is still on the rise.
What this means is that our Interactive Services team has further justification for having dropped support for IE6 last year, following in the footsteps of a few companies we admire, and moving forward we will be removing this browser from our list of supported browsers for all interactive projects by default. In the future, our clients will need specifically to request support for IE6, and extra time and budget will need to go toward such efforts as if it were an additional feature. This makes sense for us because in the past our work has been geared more toward a tech savvy B2B audience with the latest browsers and broadband connections. However, there have been some recent exceptions in which we've dealt with IE6 compatibility as a scope line item, and in some cases we have sacrificed the full experience for IE6 users, allowing them to experience only the basic functionality or simply to consume the content without the "bells and whistles."
For those of you who are not aware, because of the lack of standards support employed by Internet Explorer 6 as compared to modern browsers, developers have long lamented coding for IE6 compatibility because of the vexing problems and cumbersome code that is often necessary in order to get things to work the same way in all browsers. In a nutshell, by simply surviving this long, it began stifling innovation and has impeded the general advance of technology on the web. IE6 was released in 2001 and has sparked many online movements to kill it, but many large corporations around the word continued to support it due to legacy systems compatibility concerns (the possibility of negative impact on existing software) or the cost to upgrade, which could include training.
These figures indicate rapid movement in the right direction for web development and make Horn Group's development team smile.
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