IE6 not going anywhere soon

I've been monitoring browser statistics on clients over the last few months in order to understand the effects of the IE7 forced update by Microsoft. Among corporate clients it doesn't seem to have had much effect and IE6 looks set to be around for a while.

The Sample

To perform the analysis I took data from two well know City of London firms. I wanted to assess IE6 usage within the corporate sector. I used Google analytics to complete this analysis. I wanted to see the effect of the Microsoft auto update to IE7 on February 12th was. Admittedly this a very small sample but I know that site visitors come from corporate environments. For this blog around 31% of visitors use IE and of that only 35% use IE6. I know that is not indicative of most of my clients so hence the analysis.

Findings

Firstly Internet Explorer is the dominant browser in the corporate environment. For the three month period IE dominates with around 88% of the market. This was much higher than I had expected.

Secondly Internet Explorer 6 accounts for around half of the visitors. In three months IE6 has dropped from 53% to 49% and this has switched straight to IE7 which has risen from 35% to 39%.

Conclusion

For corporate clients at least it seems that IE6 is going to be with us for a while. For this sample it seems that the forced update of IE7 has had no noticeable effect on browser usage. The 4% shift to IE7 can probably be accounted for from upgrades to Vista. For corporate clients it seems we will need to continue supporting IE6 for a while yet. I wonder what other people's experience of the results of the forced update are?

Comments

Carly Apr 24 2008

I didn’t know about the forced update, but last week I went to my Gran’s house the other day and she still uses IE 6. (She is cool I call her technogran) She manages to use a bluetooth dongle to put photos from her camera phone onto her PC - but she refuses to update her version of internet explorer, use firefox or even leave her broadband connected all day.

Lots of people just don’t like change. They are scared that they will have to re-learn things.

I must admit though, I’ve not checked my site stats for browser use, and I’ve never tested my site in IE 6…maybe it is something I need to consider. (Naughty me.)

Clive Walker Apr 24 2008

Surely the update would be managed centrally by company IT departments and, if they have ‘auto approve’ turned off, they would likely decide on their own terms when to do this, rather than at the behest of Microsoft? That was certainly the case when I worked for a large multinational company a few years back. Mind you, I don’t know why companies do not have a more progressive policy in this respect. Perhaps, IE8 later this year will encourage them?

Adam Charnock Apr 25 2008

It is funny you should write about this - I was just checking on IE7’s adoption earlier today (as I was cursing IE6 at the time). From the looks of things it could well be a year before we can start to leave (the oh-so-wonderful) IE6 behind us :(

Clive Walker Jun 11 2008