Wordpress.Com: IE6 Still on Radar
July 14, 2008 by Rico Mossesgeld
Filed under Ramblings of a Gadget Geek
A bit old to be sure, but Matt of Automattic recently publicized browser stats for Wordpress.com, which still shows Internet Explorer is king. Here they are, compared to last year.
- 59.41% – Internet Explorer (down 3.05%), sub-breakdown:
- 53.42% – Version 7.0 (up 18.25%)
- 46.28% – Version 6.0 (down 17.82%)
- 0.14% – Version 5.5 (down 0.14%)
- 32.82% – Firefox (up 2.08%)
- 4.81% – Safari (up 0.98%)
- 2.04% – Opera (up 0.26%)
- 0.41% – Mozilla (down 0.11%)
As a counterpoint to 37signals recent dropping of IE6 from their supported browser list, Matt sums it up quite nicely:
So as you can see, IE6 users account for about 27% of all the visits we saw. If I were building something for “the internet” IE6 compatibility would still very much be on my radar. Everyone’s users or customers are different, and if I saw IE6 falling below 10% on one of my sites I’d probably very seriously consider what 37signals is doing.
We agree with Matt; though IE6 makes it harder for web designers to come up with “future-proof” web pages, making websites to work with it continues to be a requirement, at least for anyone who wants to attain a wide reach online. The only hope is to continue educating people about the benefits of moving to a newer browser, and pray for the best.
Related link: Why You Need to Test Your Web Designs on IE6 (Contract Worker)
