It has been a while since Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7. They even made it part of a Critical Update on Windows Update. However, 37.3% of Sampa site owners are still using IE 6. This month we just crossed the line where we have more site owners running IE 7 than IE 6, but still IE 6 should be into the single digit market share by now and it's not!
This annoys us mostly because there quite a bit of backward code that we have to write just to make sure things work on IE6. The two biggest issues are the many bugs around the "boxing model" and "positioning" and the lack of support for PNG Alpha channels.
However, last week we started a more aggressive strategy to get our users out of IE6. First of all, every time a new user signs up to Sampa, if they were using IE6 during the sign up process they'll get an extra email message telling them about IE6 and suggesting they should upgrade to IE7. The second thing is when they sign in to edit their website, they'll receive a message telling them they are running an older browser (they can dismiss that message forever).
We hope to see a significant drop of IE6 users over the next few weeks or so.
I wish other Web 2.0 startups would be doing something similar. All of us can only benefit by accelerating the migration to IE 7 (and FF2) and hopefully can completely drop support for IE6 in a year or so.
I don't know that asking IE6 users to upgrade to IE7 gets you many benefits other than the ones you list above (native PNG support for example.) From what I have read, IE7 moved the CSS Acid2 compliance test needle from 52% to 54% which is hardly any benefit at all.
I checked out the source of this page, and noticed that you are not using a good cross browser javascript library (...in fact it looks like you are rolling your own cross compatibility as you develope DHTML features.)
Have you considered using one of the popular libraries like PrototypeJS or JQuery so that your developers don't have to wrestle with as many of the common differences between browser javascript implementations (like addEvent vs. addEventListener?)
Hi Ryan, I don't have any problem with cross-browser Javascript/DOM compatibility, which is what Prototype is for. That, I solved 3 years ago with my own library.
I'm not sure you are familiar with IE6's well-known bugs that were fixed on IE7. That is what I want to benefit from. The bugs are so old and so well-known that they even have names!
Since upgrading is tied to the OS version, I suspect you may just have to wait it out. Plenty of people might be willing to upgrade browser version but not be in a position to upgrade OS. There ARE still some Windows 2000 users out there and they don't have the option to move to IE7.
By Kimm - 12/20/2007 6:45 AM
Admittedly, we serve a less-than-tech-savvy customer base (property management), but our stats show that roughly 95% of our site users are still on IE6. There are specific bugs that exhibit on users PC's using IE6 and they can be solved by simply upgrading to IE7, but yet it's a struggle to get anyone to make the jump. We end up often upgrading their boxes for them.
It's good to hear how you are pushing users to upgrade. We may try this in 2008.
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site owners are still using IE 6. This month we just crossed the line where we have more site owners running IE 7 than IE 6, but still IE 6 should be into the single digit market share by now and it's not!
Comments (4) for "Why people still use IE 6?"
October, 2007