IE6 Still Survives and Usage has Grown Over the Past Two Months!

Posted: 14 May 2012 04:12 AM PDT

Almost fourteen months ago, I wrote about the

IECountdown – which was like Microsoft’s official goodbye to IE6. It was a good initiative by Microsoft,
which is still trying to get rid of the bad reputation it received because
of a browser (IE6) stuck in time.

Last year,
Internet Explorer 6 still accounted for 12% of the world’s browser market.

I decided to check on some stats and see if things have really changed or is IE6 still proving very difficult for Microsoft to kill off.

I decided to use statistics from NetMarketShare the same source that Microsoft uses to show IE6 usage on the IE6 Countdown website.

About 7.1% of the browsers are still on IE6.
That is not the surprising part. The browser share of IE6 has grown in the past couple of months from 6.8% in Feb 2012 to 7.1% in April 2012. Usually this share goes up during December when year ending accounts are done on enterprise computers which still often run only on IE6.

China still seems to be the biggest market for IE6. An astounding 23.8% of the browsers in China are IE6.
Internet Explorer was shipped as a default browser with Vista almost half a decade ago.
Strangely more people still use IE6 when compared to IE7.
Even though we are on version 10 for IE, the most popular version is Internet Explorer 8,
which was released in 2009.

Internet Explorer has a very fragmented market share based on their browser versions.

For example, most Firefox and Chrome users are on the latest versions of their browser.

On Chrome, users do not even really notice when their browsers automatically updates to newer versions.

I must say that Microsoft has recently woken up to the horrendous reputation of IE.

Hopefully the recent spike in IE6 usage is just a blip before its eventual demise.

Do drop in your comments.