well that *is* weird

Although Net Applications data aren't as outrageous as this, they do show IE6 share at the highest it's been for a little over a month (on May 11th) and the "weekend IE6 trough" increased ~1% from the weekend of May 2/3 to May 9/10... What a bizarre anomaly!

Maybe some webcrawler started using the IE6 UA string as a workaround to malicious sites that send different data to search engines and to human users?

Or the effect is just too big to be explained by anything else than a bug?

Mass downgrade from Vista to XP? *shrugs*

I've noticed a similar thing on http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
A couple of months ago, for source 1, IE7 surpassed IE6... But it's been the opposite trend since then. Now it's IE7: 11%, and IE6: 58%.

By the way, this reminds me of: http://www.css3.info/kill-ie6-to-let-css3-live/
Posted over 2 years ago.

It's about IE6 refusing to die, and going back up in the stats for an unknown reason, like a zombie. Could be the same effect we're seeing now.

Still, looking back at this article, it's encouraging to see how much the market share of IE6 shrank within 2 years.

Lets put it this way..

what browser do you suppose the most vulnerable ones in a botnet are running? Also, what browser do you suppose is the default on a pirated version of Vista (which won't be able to get security updates and again, will be most likely to end up on a botnet)?

That answer to both is the answer you seek.

"Also, what browser do you suppose is the default on a pirated version of Vista (which won't be able to get security updates and again, will be most likely to end up on a botnet)?"

... IE7. :p

By the way, I just noticed youtube pushes IE6 users to upgrade (header message suggesting upgrading, and features like HD mode not being available for IE6 users). That's nice.

I know what's happening. There is a web developer at a backbone ISP. He makes all of his customer sites targeted at IE6 (has been for years, why change?) His boss is getting complaints from customers that their sites look like #$%@ in modern web browsers. This boss is pressuring said web developer to start targeting IE7/8 and Firefox. The web developer is stubbornly angry about this, so he wrote a virus that changes the user agent for all IE 7+ and Firefox users to IE 6. He put the word "Conficker" in his code, and released it through his backbone connection. Now he's just waiting for the stats to show that IE6 really IS the best and most popular browser out there so that he can change his Boss' mind.

If you look it over a few days it's made about a 8.5% jump from lowest to highest share, Firefox seems to have taken the brunt of this from in almost exactly the same time span falling about 4.9%.

Interesting to see what the post-analysis for this will be. Bug in software? Faulty sample studies? Bot-net? Maybe people just decided they like IE 6 best :D

Windows 7 XP mode maybe?

FWIW, it seems to be almost exclusively an 'Asian' phenomenon. Not in China or India, but South Korea and especially Vietnam show clear peaks of IE6 usage from 8th to 17th of May.

Vietnam mirrors the trend best: Significantly more IE6, significantly less Firefox, less everything else. Since the Asian chart looks alike in that time frame and alternative browser usage also decreased appropriately, I think this means a general increase in web traffic in Vietnam during that time frame (mostly IE6 traffic). Basically, "FF and others" usage went down to 25% of it's "normal" value. That'd mean a 300% increase in traffic (most of which must've been IE6). Also about a 100% increase in South Korea (though at the expense of IE7 mostly).
My guess is as good as anyone's, but I'd think only a botnet could increase traffic that drastically for a temporary amount of time (7-14 days).

I'd like to know where one might find traffic figures (preferably web traffic figures), so I could check whether traffic went up in Vietnam or not, and what the percentage of global traffic is.

Then again, a bug in their counter in Vietnam might be more likely than a botnet attack in which browsers are used, on websites which use StatCounter. So there.