Internet Explorer Market Share Slide Represents the Inevitable

Amazingly, for all the web design nightmares it causes, Internet Explorer 6 has proven pretty resilient. Despite being the oldest version of Microsoft’s maligned web browser, over 40% of web users used it, according to web analytics firm Omniture (as of December 2007).

It’s as if those pesky customers refused to update to a more advanced browser (heck, even IE7 would’ve provided a better and more secure browsing environment). Thus, it seemed that companies like 37signals and Google had to take the lead, having to publicly announce that they would no longer bother making future and current projects work properly on IE6, an application that was released way back in 2001.

Thus, the slide of IE’s market share, while definitely representing welcome relief for web developers and designers, is probably not that much a surprise for a lot of people. Even the most unassailable grips on markets start to wear away—no matter how much control the leader may exercise on the market—if newer and better competitors literally continue leaving it behind.

Sometimes this happens because customers wise up. Much rarer in my opinion is the scenario where companies and service providers basically arm-twist their users into making sensible upgrades. As the 37signals blog shares about MobileMe’s lack of support for IE6:

…I’m hoping it’s the beginning of a trend. IE 6 is definitely the most painful browser for us to support – it’s seven years old and doesn’t even fully support the CSS 1.0 standard created in 1996. Microsoft’s done an incredibly poor job of getting users to upgrade. It looks like it’s going to take pressure from big apps like MobileMe to seal the deal.