Yucca

The undead browser continues to haunt developers

Despite the fact that I work in a digital agency and that my girlfriend is convinced that I work in IT, I am peculiarly proud of my “non-techie” status. This status means that no one asks me to fix anything (ever) and, more importantly, I’m not obliged to “get” Karl and Richie’s geeky jokes. However, it also means that the topics of many conversations in the Yucca office mean very little to me.

One such topic is the technical team’s long-running consternation over the Great British public’s continued use of Internet Explorer 6.0. As far as I can tell, different web browsers and different versions of those browsers deal with websites in different ways, which makes for grumpy developers. The behaviour of IE6 is, apparently, particularly irksome, and the time when this browser version ceases to be used by a significant proportion of the internet population is as keenly awaited as Bristol City’s ascendency to the Premiership.

So, in an effort to engage with the other half of the office, I thought I’d have a look at some Google Analytics data on browser usage across a range of Yucca client sites and spread the joyful news of the demise of IE6. Unfortunately, the stats had other ideas.



Across a seven-figure sample of visits made to a varied selection of websites in the last 6 weeks, I totted up the market share for each of the main browsers – IE, Firefox and Chrome (no Safari, I’m a PC) – as well as for IE6 on its own. It turns out that, two and a half years after it was superseded by IE7 (and around a year since the release of IE8) around 10% of internet users are keeping it old-skool with IE6.

All versions of Firefox (the second most popular browser) account for 15% of the market, which makes the 10% figure for IE6 alone quite startling. Despite a prominent marketing campaign, Chrome is a distant third-place with less than 4% of the market.

What’s more, the decline in the use of IE6 (at least in percentage terms) does not appear to be accelerating and I’d be surprised if it didn’t still maintain a 2-3% share at the end of 2010.

All of which means that I can’t supply the tech team with any good news. At least not until they make me a cup of tea.