October 2009 Browser Stats!

I thought most people here would be interested in seeing these… Firefox officially passed IE6 , but the browsersaurus still hasn’t dropped below the magic 10%.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/11/october-2009-browser-stats-firefox-finally-passes-ie6.ars

Interesting observation: Firefox users all seem to migrate to the newest version quickly with the most users being on 3.5, while IE usage is spread out pretty much equally, with the LEAST users using the latest version. Odd? Or just proof that IE users are either stuck on old versions becuase of corporate legalities or uninterested in ever ever ever accepting change…. which pretty much sums up the people that use either browser (early adopters vs. last one’s to get on board). We’ll see what happens next month as the Windows 7 release begins to influence the numbers.

Speaking of which…

http://marylandmedia.com/2006/12/time-breakdown-of-modern-web-design/

You all probably know this. But it is quite nice and funny visual representation of the evil thoughts that we all share about this so called browser.

Hah! Nice, hadn’t seen this yet. I love that the time it takes to make the site compliant (which SHOULD be the standard of all browsers) is represented as a tiny fraction of what it actually takes to test for IE. Funny stuff.

Good thread @epicera a few of us were talking about this the other day on twitter – I agree with all your observations – one thing that does worry me is your statement:

Or just proof that IE users are either stuck on old versions becuase of corporate legalities or uninterested in ever ever ever accepting change….

If this is the case – and quite possibly – then we are only ever going to see the figure drop for IE6 if we get a large proportion of new internet users to help reduce the market share based on a total user base.

If that is the case – we could still be looking at years! Scary.

I totally agree Jonathan. The bottleneck really becomes if/when the corporate computers begin to break down or become too slow to perform mundane tasks… in which case it becomes cost effective for some of these corporations and government institutions (which account for LOTS of IE6 users) to begin updating to the more recent versions of IE… which isn’t Firefox, but it beats the heck out of writing endless underscore hacks for IE6 . I haven’t had a computer last me more than 3 years without making me itch for an upgrade… so I’d like to think that lots of these havens for IE6 won’t be too far behind. But yes, years might be an accurate assumption for IE6 to drop from 23% to 9.9%.

Just a note: Jeffrey’s mentioned a lot in the past that once IE6 officially drops below 10% that we as authors won’t need to sweat it so much anymore… I’m sure most authors will still want to support it on a limited basis, but it’ll be a significantly smaller headache to just clean up basic styling issues.

To bad Microsoft can’t force users to update there browser to the latest version. Or just remove IE and mass install FireFox…