Wednesday, 11 February 2009

It Was A Beautiful Day

We've had about a hundred (well actually three) really good ideas for blog posts in the last few days but we've shelved them in order to celebrate the slow and not unwelcome death throes of an old and tired adversary.

Take a look at the top of our blog page, right up under the logo and such. See where it says about tying Internet Explorer 6 (aka IE6) to a chair and cutting its ear off? We meant every word. IE6 has been the bane of every web designers life for far too long. Box model hacks, star hacks, margin errors and such have driven us to quite literally mad. But no more! The promised land is in sight!

A quick blaze around our own and the various Google Analytics accounts of our clients have confirmed what we came across earlier today on the W3 Schools website. Usage of IE6 is in steep decline. This is a great thing for the internet as a whole. No more will we be forced to stuff the unstuffable into stuffy holes just so it renders properly in that awful retard of a web browser. W3 Schools have the following stats over the past year:

2009 IE7 IE6 IE8 Firefox
January 25.7% 18.5% 0.6% 45.5%





2008 IE7 IE6 IE5 Firefox
December 26.1% 19.6%
44.4%
November 26.6% 20.0%
44.2%
October 26.9% 20.2%
44.0%
September 26.3% 22.3%
42.6%
August 26.0% 24.5%
43.7%
July 26.4% 25.3%
42.6%
June 27.0% 26.5% 0.5% 41.0%
May 26.5% 27.3% 0.7% 39.8%
April 24.9% 28.9% 1.0% 39.1%
March 23.3% 29.5% 1.1% 37.0%
February 22.7% 30.7% 1.3% 36.5%
January 21.2% 32.0% 1.5% 36.4%

Honestly, that's a joy to behold. Our own research suggests that of the IE use on our sites IE7 is sitting pretty at about 75%, IE6 at about 20% with IE8 making up the rest. Firefox (at a stunning 45.5%!) might not be perfect either but it's worlds better than IE6. Ding dong folks, the witch is (almost) dead. Hug a web designer, they'll be up for it.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting post. But the rate of decline is at most half a percentage point per month. At that rate, we could still be seeing IE6 for a long, long time...

8:30 pm, February 11, 2009  
Blogger Marty said...

Aye we've a way to go to finally eradicate the menace once and for all but I was suprised to see Firefox maintain such a market share.

We're no longer 'fully' supporting IE6 in that we're not hacking sites to get them to look good in IE6 at the expense of better renderers. I think soon we'll probably drop it altogether, probably by the end of this year. If a lot of design companies take that approach then we can speed up its demise. What's FRONT's take?

5:22 pm, February 12, 2009  

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