3779 days of IE6

In 2001 Microsoft brought us Internet Explorer 6. Little did we know just how much hurt this little application was going to cause us – if we had there's a fair chance we'd have formed a circus troop instead. This year, 2012, sees the end of an era for us as we officially stop supporting for IE6. So why have we stopped?

IE6 had a nasty habit of making itself indispensable, not on merit, but through long standing ties with other applications. Many people got stuck because they relied on older Windows operating systems that only supported up to version 6, or used applications that in turn relied on it. So many got stuck in fact that in 2008, despite the launch of IE7 & 8 (beta 2) an estimated 39% of internet users world-wide still used IE6.

Today I'm happy to report that things are very different, in the UK less than three percent of internet users are browsing with IE6. The official Microsoft figure is actually lower still at 1.4%.

The browser market remains split, with IE8 & 9, Chrome, Firefox and Safari sharing the vast majority of internet users. But despite this split, and especially since Microsoft's renewed commitment to IE with their release of IE9 in 2011, the browser vendors seem committed to compliance, each striving to ensure that their browser supports the web standards put in place by the W3C.

With the passing of IE6 and the commitment by vendors to comply with web standards, we're no longer limited to the features of a decade old browser, nor do we have to spend hours applying dreaded 'ie6 hacks' to our beautiful HTML and CSS. This time will now be far better spent, not on browser compliancy, but on improving the experience for users.

The demise of IE7 – unlike IE6, IE7 never gained the popularity of its elder sibling, however in the UK at least it retains a decreasing but substantial 10% market share. In 12 months time, or perhaps less, it looks set that this too will fall below 5%.

Where did the stats come from – the percentages used within this article are based on data gleaned from our UK client base, except for the official Microsoft figure which is taken from http://www.ie6countdown.com/.