Not, that I run any Site, that has to earn money, but I would NEVER code a site specifically to one browser. HTML has to be coded as is, on defined standards and that's it.

As long as the whole web silently agrees, that Microsoft can do, what they want, why should they change anything?

We, the Web as a whole have to put an end to this farce.
No one, who runs a site should support that. No one.

Tyler out!

All I can say is THANK GOD. Finally! IE8 has pretty good CSS support (Full CSS 2.1 specification compliance), and I'm usually quite happy when testing websites in it. IE6 is slowly sliding off my radar of browsers to test with.

Die IE 6, die!

What’s stupefying is that IE8 didn’t accelerate IE6’s slow but steady decline one bit! The increase in IE8 market share seems to be IE7 users upgrading and nothing more. And for one year or two when IE8 was still not out, IE7 didn’t gain users while IE6 was still going down (awfully slowly but down nonetheless). So:

- IE8 eats IE7;
- competing browsers (mostly Firefox and Safari) eat IE6.

If companies don't start to replace IE6 with IE8 or at least IE7 (some have a policy of being one major version late…), IE6 will take an excruciatingly long time to die.

Florent V, IE6's decline has nothing to do with any other browsers. The decline is steady with the overall growth of the Web and with the PC upgrade cycle.

Nothing anyone does, including Microsoft, is going to cause it to drop faster.

The good news is that it will probably fall to under 10% by the end of this year. That's really quite good news :-)

- A

Trend looks good! Expect it to accelerate considerably when Win7 is released, soon corporates will look to upgrade the OS from XP, when that happens bye bye IE6 - finally!

Looks like IE7 could become less popular than IE6, though.

Dao, IE 7 will most definitely become less popular than IE 6. I expect IE 7 will fall below IE 6 usage in the next three months. IE 8 will take most of that lost share but Firefox will take a bit of it too.

- A

Or to put it another way, IE 8 and Firefox 3.5 are going to be in good shape in the late months of this year with ~35% and ~25% respectively, while IE 6 and 7 will be between 12% and 15% each. Safari will be behind even those two losing browsers with ~8-10% share and Chrome will probably have somewhere around 3%.

- A

DIE IE8 DIE !

I like to think that the remaining 16% are mostly people in large corporations which are forced to use IE6 and web developers testing out their own sites. So cutting support for the damn 8 year old browser seems reasonable, right?

It's a relief for digital agencies not having to code for IE6 (and all the hundreds of hacks involved) to get a web design to work.

yikes!

Also, consider being a supporter for the .Net mag campaign at www.bringdownie6.com .

I suggested this in a post earlier.

Can you make a plot of browser passing the Acid2 test?

Reading your number, it must be somewhere around 75% at the end of this year.

Lucas

Nonsense. This comparison is irrelevant.
"IE6 is the least popular IE browser"? WTF? It was before IE8 even came out!
IE8 has taken IE7 users only.
IE6 usage has actually flattened since IE8 came out, according to your own graph!
http://imgur.com/HKB3J.jpg

Don't gloat! IE6 will be ahead of IE7 by about Christmas, and could even overtake IE8 again within two years. Just you wait and see.

IE6 falls behind IE8 only in a minority of browser stats.

See:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php (down as I write this)

@Bob: what are you talking about? In case that wasn't clear, Asa meant "least popular" as in "least used", not "least liked" or whatever. IE6 certainly wasn't less used than IE8 before IE8 came out... and it still isn't.

Asa: the spam filter ate my comment again...

"internet explorer 6 finally falls"

Finally? What are you a moron? It is following the same slope of slow burn it has for the past year. Besides, are you really going to ignore 1 in 6 of your visitors?

"internet explorer 6 finally falls"

Finally? What are you a moron? It is following the same slope of slow burn it has for the past year. Besides, are you really going to ignore 1 in 6 of your visitors?

@originalgeek
"Finally? What are you a moron? It is following the same slope of slow burn it has for the past year."

Yeah, so? "Finally" doesn't imply it's a brutal fall. Calling people names over something like that, seriously... Pathetic.

@Horia said, "I like to think that the remaining 16% are mostly people in large corporations which are forced to use IE6 and web developers testing out their own sites." Well, It's unlikely that's all of them. If you look at weekdays to weekends and workdays to nights, you'll see that IE 6 has a much bigger drop, but not completely. Not even a majority. On a typical weekday over the last month, IE 6 had about 17.5% usage share. On a weekend, it was 12.5%. So, a good chunk, maybe 5%, are using IE 6 at work and not at home. But that leaves over 12% who are using IE at home and that's still more than all Safari, Opera, and Chrome combined.

@Lucas, here you are :-)

@Bob, that flattening is seasonal. I've already said that no other browser is actually impacting IE 6. It's falling at its own pace and will continue to do so. Nevertheless, it's fallen and IE 8 has overtaken it. That's meaningful.

@Pete :-)

@stufu, (comment approved) and you point to other stats sites that don't agree but those stats sites have smaller sample and worse records than Net Applications. I chose to go with Net Applications for global and North American stats, which I think is the best available. Web developers should be looking at stats for their audiences, of course, but the global trends are also interesting to them because it provides a good barometer.

@originalgeek, maybe you didn't read my post or comments here. I've made it abundantly clear as long as I've been tracking this that IE 6 is falling at its own pace, irrespective of other browser gains or losses. It has finally fallen to IE 8, both because of its drop and IE8s rise. That's a real change. I didn't say IE 8 took that share from IE 6. It didn't (any more than any of the modern browsers have.) Re-read what I wrote. And neither did I say that Web developers should ignore any users, much less IE 6 users or "1 in 6 of your visitors". Again, I encourage you to re-read the post and find something more honest to be contrarian about.

- A

Thanks! I think it is a good graph to show that standards are winning!

Lucas

Thanks for your information.

when I go to the Net Applications Browser Market Share Report, I see only

"This report's data is currently under review. It will become available as soon as possible."

Turns out June's market share has "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics", so they are reviewing them.
As a result, I wonder how trustworthy these statistics are, but they are still interesting.

My IE8 crash on Acid3 test. Long live, IE5.5 !

The funny part is that the IE 8 stole the users from IE 7 and not 6.
Programming for IE 6 and 7 is real pain because the CSS engine has bugs and JScript is slow.
Here's a test page to see what I'm taking about.
http://bateru.com/jquery/jquizme2/demo2.html

it seems Net Applications still can't decide what's wrong with their June data. I wonder how strange their data looked like.

IE 6 Still Rules !!! - on the OTHER WEB, ie intRAnet.

In most US Corp, they need IE 6 for their intranet and IE6 is the standard there. The intranet applications include even the ones from IBM which will run only in IE6 or IE5. So as many stopped migration from WinXP to Vista I guess, they may at least use IE6 for another two years. This migration process where stopped due to
a) Current Economy.
b) Vista is crap.
c) Waiting for up coming Win 7 to stable.

Now here is a business opportunity for Mozilla Corp to start a "Professional Service Division" which will upgrade existing IE6 intranet application at a cheaper rate they can afford now.

Why is IE6 so popular? I have a theory. Windows XP comes with IE6 pre-installed. Everyone knows that you can upgrade to IE7 or IE8 now. If you have an illegal version of XP however you cannot upgrade so easily. So your stuck with IE6. How many people around the world are still running illegal versions of XP? Food for thought.

"If you have an illegal version of XP however you cannot upgrade so easily. So your stuck with IE6. How many people around the world are still running illegal versions of XP?"

cesrage, that's not true actually. Microsoft dropped the WGA requirement a year after IE 7 shipped. You can see it as the second big upswing for IE 7 in the first chart.

- A

only 1 reason for still ie6 live,
gui

Looking at these comments, it's kind of sad how many people haven't the slightest clue about IE6. I'll bet more than half of them are bashing it because everyone else is.

I could see some of those companies upgrading to Windows XP fairly soon, though. Computers are still falling in price, so maybe they'll finally spend the couple thousand they'll need to re-outfit their offices. At that point, they'd be able to install IE7, if they could also be bothered to re-write their intraweb.

Frankly, the whole situation looks dire. I'd say IE6 will dip lower and lower, but also slow in its descent. Eventually, we'll be left with that maddening 1% that still needs to be checked sometimes.

I've been humming and hawing about Chrome's update cycle. The new version comes out, everyone's browser updates, and that's it: 98% conversion in the month. Even Firefox took a year to migrate most of its users from 2 to 3, and there are still a significant number on 2, even though 3.5 is out.

IE6 has been my computer's installed default browser until I upgraded. I remembered all of the hardships I had with it. IE7 and Firefox 2 fared much better, but some problems still existed. Now that I have upgraded browsers again, I am finding that IE8 has much better webpage loading performance than even Firefox 3.5. Additionally, I recently loaded a website using Firefox 3.5 and caught viruses. With the above mentioned, I may be considering getting rid of the Firefox browser completely and keeping IE8 as my sole browser. I would be glad to exchange a few extra add-on features for increased security.

IE6 has been my computer's installed default browser until I upgraded. I remembered all of the hardships I had with it. IE7 and Firefox 2 fared much better, but some problems still existed. Now that I have upgraded browsers again, I am finding that IE8 has much better webpage loading performance than even Firefox 3.5. Additionally, I recently loaded a website using Firefox 3.5 and caught viruses. With the above mentioned, I may be considering getting rid of the Firefox browser completely and keeping IE8 as my sole browser. I would be glad to exchange a few extra add-on features for increased security.

Hello! Repentant klooper for my english jer, buti particular nice re say gJ$)Kd!!!.