{"id":74,"date":"2009-09-01T17:56:09","date_gmt":"2009-09-01T16:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/?p=74"},"modified":"2009-09-01T17:56:09","modified_gmt":"2009-09-01T16:56:09","slug":"ie6-is-the-most-popular-browser-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/ie6-is-the-most-popular-browser-in-the-world-74.html","title":{"rendered":"IE6 Is the most popular browser in the world!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I do a lot of testing on any website I design or change.\u00a0 It is very important that the site works properly and displays properly for everybody.\u00a0 I try to make any website I work on comply with the proper standards so that it will work correctly in any\u00a0 browser.\u00a0 I test in as many browsers as I can because even the best browsers have slight differences in the way they implement web standards.<\/p>\n

And then there is Internet Explorer 6! <\/strong>The bane of any web designer’s life.\u00a0 Getting IE6 to behave the same way as more modern browsers can be a real pain.\u00a0 If a site works in any more modern browser it will probably be pretty good in all the others.\u00a0 Anything that works in Firefox will almost certainly work\u00a0 prettywll in Chrome, Safari and Opera and although IE7 and IE8 are not as good at complying with the standards they aren’t too difficult to work with.<\/p>\n

IE6 Market Share overtakes IE7!<\/h2>\n

The problem is that IE6 is still installed on millions of machines around the world. \u00a0 In fact I just checked out browser versions on the excellent marketshare<\/a> website and discovered that IE6 has regained its position as the most popular browser in the world with over 25% of the market.\u00a0 This is largely due to the advent of IE8, many people are starting to migrate from IE7 to IE8 which means that the market share of the newer browsers is being split.\u00a0 If you combine the shares of IE7 & IE8 it adds up to more than 36%.<\/p>\n

I guess that most people who have made the move to IE7 will be happy enough to let Microsoft upgrade them to IE8 so eventually IE7 will fade away as earlier versions like IE4 & IE5 have.\u00a0 But IE6 is a bigger problem, it was the biggest browser for a\u00a0 long time early on in the development of a lot of corporate systems, and it still works just as well as it ever did.
\nIf you are running a corporate intranet the substantial cost of\u00a0 upgrading hundreds or thousands of PCs\u00a0 to a newer browser and retesting all your internal systems to make sure they still work properly is not matched by any real benefit.\u00a0 It isn’t broken so don’t\u00a0 fix it.<\/p>\n

This means that while a corporation may have a lovely modern website for its external customers to use, it may only have IE6 installed for its own staff, that is the browser that has been tested against their internal systems.\u00a0 But this means that when those staff do a bit of surfing in their lunch hour they are still using IE6 to look at everyone else’s websites.<\/p>\n

IE6 for Ever<\/h2>\n

I can’t see this situation changing any time in the next few years, IE6 will continue its slow decline and new websites will have to contine to support it.\u00a0 This support comes at a cost, extra testing, extra coding and of course a whole bunch of lovely new features like CSS2 & CSS3 which make building good websites much easier but which IE6 just doesn’t know about.<\/p>\n

So much as I loathe IE6 I continue to use it every day for testing.\u00a0\u00a0 If your site doesn’t work properly with IE6 you could be losing 25% of the customers that have already made the effort to find your site.\u00a0 That is like kicking out 25% of the customers in your shop because you don’t like the way they talk.\u00a0 Not a good way to run a business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I do a lot of testing on any website I design or change.\u00a0 It is very important that the site works properly and displays properly for everybody.\u00a0 I try to make any website I work on comply with the proper standards so that it will work correctly in any\u00a0 browser.\u00a0 I test in as many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[33,28,37,1,18,12],"tags":[138,61,62,60,136],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78,"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cotsweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}