The Slow Death of IE6
So, I’m a front end developer at NC State University in DELTA (essentially distance education) and we use a learning management system (LMS) called Blackboard, you may be familiar with it. It used to be called WebCT, then it was WebCT Vista, then Blackboard bought it out and I think the official name is “Blackboard Vista” now… not important. The LMS is a place where teachers can host a course online, it’s like a glorified CMS… just for some background.
Anyway, our LMS login page is located at http://vista.ncsu.edu, it’s probably one of the top 2 or 3 most visted NC State web sites for students, coming in at around 25,000 hits per day, everyone uses it to log into their course. I’ve been running Google Analytics on it for about 6 months now, watching the browser habits of all the students. Having so many hits every day I figured this was the best place I could use to gather a good sample; and over the past 6 months or so I’ve noticed an immerging trend.
These are my findings for the 4 major browsers, I didn’t list to others since there’s around 15 used on the site (well, 3 majors and Opera).
| Visits | Percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| Internet Explorer | 1,371,166 | 58.18% |
| Firefox | 814,412 | 34.55% |
| Safari | 151,265 | 6.42% |
| Opera | 6,845 | 0.29% |
At first glance these stats don’t really say anything shocking, but when you dive into them further you can see what I’m talking about. The trend I’ve noticed lies in Internet Explorer. Here are those stats:
| Visits | Percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| IE6 | 487,335 | 35.54% |
| IE7 | 882,744 | 64.38% |
That’s it! That’s IE7 taking over the market share from IE6. So we have a new order of things:
- IE7 (38%)
- Firefox (35%)
- IE6 (20%)
- Safari (6%)
- Opera & others
It’s been a very gradual change over the time I’ve been paying attention, but I think it’s finally noticable enough to mention. I know this data isn’t 100% accurate, but it does represent a very Internet-savvy demographic of 18–25 year olds. And just to show that IE7 is still gaining ground, here are the stats for the past month:
| Visits | Percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| IE6 | 76,004 | 29.20% |
| IE7 | 184,091 | 70.73% |
Firefox has been holding strong around 34%–36% market share throughout this whole dataset.
This news actually makes me a lot less weary of the upcoming release of IE8. My initial reaction when I heard about it was “oh great, now we have to deal with IE6, IE7 and IE8 compatibility”. With the slow death of IE6 it gives me some hope that maybe Microsoft will push IE8 hard and get it out to canabalize the IE6 market share even further. If this trend continues, let’s say IE8 comes out around December (I think that’s a fair assumption, although I really don’t know how far along they are in development, since I haven’t even heard about a beta yet), version 7 adoption should be around 80%-85% (within IE, not global market share). That’s very managable and with the CSS advancements in IE7, I can deal with it until IE8 takes over even further. We can only hope that it doesn’t take as long as IE7 to overtake its predecessor.
It’s not that bad, the web is cleaning up its act!
with ease,
Tim
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[...] As the dust takes a long time to settle after the recent discussions over the version targeting in Internet Explorer 8 we seem to be living in the future. Tim at CSS Karma made an interesting observation over the market share IE6 and 7 have at the moment. [...]
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Ooh, my site, though with a fraction of the hits, mimics your last months stats kind of closely. IE7 gets 64% to IE6′s 34%.
That is interesting as I still assumed they were about even. Perhaps the recent automatic update push has slid IE6 further out of the picture.
Oh, and apparently IE8 is ready enough to pass the Acid2 test and be demonstrated at Mix 08 in March, so it can’t be far away from a public beta. At least we hope anyway. Of course, with the version targeting of IE8 you can aim sites at just IE7 for as long as you want, until IE6 is completely out of the way if that’s what you fancied.
IE6 had a long innings, but it’s nice to see it disappearing now!
That’s awesome, I’m glad that someone else is getting the same stats as me. Very encouraging!