It’s been a week of big news on everyone’s favorite albatross, IE6.
First, YouTube is phasing out IE6. Facebook, another big-ticket site, has already been warning users to move away from IE6.
There was a lot of Web buzz about six months ago when a Norwegian site officially stopped supporting IE6. That was all fine and good, but, well, it was a Norwegian site most people had never heard of, and so unlikely to motivate users to switch. By contrast, according to this week’s Newsweek, YouTube is the third-biggest site on the Internet, with 426M visitors per month, so it’s pretty meaningful when a site like that decides it can start dropping support for a browser. When users can’t access YouTube or Facebook with IE6, maybe that will finally be the kick in the pants they need to upgrade.
Second, the crew at Digg did some great research on their IE6 users. They found that IE6 was about 10% of their traffic and was using a lot of development time, but accounted for only 1% of the traffic that was actually using Digg’s bookmarking features. So they polled their IE6 users to find out why they were still using IE6. They found that 69% said that work was forcing them to use it, either by stating they had to or by not giving them admin access on their computers.
Mind you, Digg users are likely to be a tech-savvier lot than users overall, where I suspect you’ll find more users who are naive or stubborn about browser upgrades. Still, this does shine a light on IE6 usage – that it may be corporate IT departments who pose the biggest obstacle to getting rid of IE6, not average users digging in their heels.
Posted in Browsers, IE6 |
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