The Awful Truth of Actual Internet Explorer Usage Statistics

August 27, 2011 is the 10th anniversary of Internet Explorer 6. Back in those days, ten years ago this software was one of the best technological achievements ever accomplished by mankind. An important milestone has been reached that day and we should give this epic web browser a credit. But what do we have now? Ten years have passed and now we can observe how technologies can make a monster from a harmless old school web browser. I’m not trying to protect IE6 and I know how many problems it brings to web developers. It is obvious that it should have been abandoned by the world 5-6 years ago and left only in museums. But reality is cruel, because of the fact this browser hasn’t been abandoned the Internet today is not as good as it could have been.

There is a massive media campaign concerning the process of dropping support for IE6. Many respectful and influential web projects have already done that – remember a social media wave of delightful admiration about WordPress 3.2 without IE6 and other similar events? Even Microsoft is trying to fight its own child and has created a website called IE6countdown where you can track online data concerning IE6 usage all over the world. What is interesting that China has the highest percentage of IE6 usage – 30.5%. That’s absolutely unbelievable considering China’s population and the number of Internet users there. Other countries are not as “advanced” in this field, but some still do have over 4% of IE6 usage.

The Awful Truth of Actual Internet Explorer Usage Statistics

Also on that website you can find a small code snippet which can be added to your website’s header, the point is every time the user will browse your website via IE6 there will be a message displayed informing a person that they should update their web browser immediately. We assume that it is very useful project aimed at saving hours of work for web developers and website owners as well as making the web a better and a safer place for browsing.

The Awful Truth of Actual Internet Explorer Usage Statistics

Today, even though Internet Explorer has lost its leading positions in the browsers race, it is too early to claim it as an outsider on the field. Strong 20% and more is not a bad result at all for the company whose product was proclaimed to be the worst browser in the history of the web. Here are some major stats about Browser usage statistics in 2011 by months.

The Awful Truth of Actual Internet Explorer Usage Statistics

2011 was one of the most successful years for IE6 haters because we can observe how drastically IE6′s share has decreased over this year. The following chart shows us the recent data about IE versions’ usage and we can state the fact that IE6 is almost dead now. Soon all web developers all over the world will be able to celebrate the victory over the Goliath of the web.

The Awful Truth of Actual Internet Explorer Usage Statistics

Looks like everything is going pretty well and soon Internet Explorer 6 will be forgotten, but hey – that’s not that much of a surprise for us all, right? What does matter now is what will happen to Internet Explorer 7? I mean there is a chance that this software may also become a target that must be terminated right after its elder brother. On one hand, IE7 is not as bad as the previous version, but on the other hand it does have a lot of negative sides which cause so much headache with the HTML markup validation and the new CSS features. We also don’t know what will happen, but we’re dying to know your opinion. We’ve decided to ask your thoughts on this and here is our Internet Explorer Versions Survey that would like you to take. Please take a couple of minutes to complete our survey and help us all find out the facts. Very soon we will publish results of this research and will keep the discussion going. Also, feel free to express your opinion on this topic in the comments section to this post.

Written by Edward Korcheg

Edward has been with TemplateMonster blog since 2009 and is a great fan of social media and web development trends (especially jQuery and HTML5). In fact, HTML5 along with retro trucks are his two biggest hobbies. He dreams of one day coding himself a retro truck using nothing but HTML5 Canvas tag.
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    • Nancy

      Website design now requires testing in various browsers and multiple platforms. It’s very frustrating to find that Microsoft fails to improve its IE and keep up with web development trends.  Tweaking a site to work with IE often results in loss of desired functionality. With the current shift to other browsers, maybe Microsoft will improve it’s declining product or take it off the market so we no longer have to beat our heads against the wall.

    • Nancy

      Website design now requires testing in various browsers and multiple platforms. It’s very frustrating to find that Microsoft fails to improve its IE and keep up with web development trends.  Tweaking a site to work with IE often results in loss of desired functionality. With the current shift to other browsers, maybe Microsoft will improve it’s declining product or take it off the market so we no longer have to beat our heads against the wall.

    • JPMaster

      For many years we used Firefox but with release of version 5 not being compatible with some functions we use, we decided to let it rest in peace. We are trying out Chrome but still don’t like the fact that it’s missing the dropdown history in the navigaton bar. Having to type to get the address is a waste of time.

      Regarding to website design, it is frustrating to see some things work in many browsers but not in IE and if they do work in IE… they don’t work on the rest.

      • Michael Hiroshi

        I agree Firefox 5 is not compatible with some plugins.  I don’t use IE before but Google toolbar’s Translator works on it.  I don’t use Chrome because the mouse doesn’t scroll (and dropdown history too)

        So in the end I have to use both Firefox and IE.  oh..

    • Phil

      thanks Edwards for this interesting article, and useful link to M$ website

    • Karl

      The other awful truth is that many users are just not that computer savvy and either can’t or won’t upgrade to the latest browser version. Therefore you get one ot two users complaining to the site owner that they’re having problems with the website, while the rest of the world is either using the latest browser version or a different browser altogether… and that’s where the headaches start! The site owner, who by the way, also has an older version, doesn’t care about ‘getting with the program’. He/She worries only about that one complaint. Can you imagine i recently had the re-do a website in HTML simply to please a client? And the client has no idea just how much functionality of the website was lost! Are you kidding me?

      By the way, I don’t like ANY version of Internet Explorer!

    • sixgun

      The reason China has such a high user rate on IE6 is that they copied Windows from a single disk – no lie, I’ve been inside companies where there are hundreds of XP computers and not a single copy of a licensed copy of Windows.    XP was simple to proliferate,   the others not so much.      Developers need to start building  sense code into their HTML5 sites – that way – a banner is displayed when old browsers are found.   A lot of people upgrade this way,  and we have found users do not mind at all.   What MS needs to is “man up” and just drop the bomb on it, it would do the entire world a big favor.   Personally, I HATE Internet explorer and do not agree with your statement of “epic web browser” – it was a kludge,  riddled with security holes and code buried inside Win-DOZE made it so it would run faster than competitors products.    IE can go away any time,   for good.   We have hundreds of sites out there and we absolutely cringe when we hear the words “I can’t view the site on my PC”.    Google Chrome and Firefox are such better products all around,  and of course,   we use Macs and Safari rocks!  

      • HonestBWF

        As much as I agree with the overall comments on IE 7 and IE 6 particularly. There is a place where IE 8 and IE 9 live and dominate. And that’s in corporate intranets. As a consultant, I see countless corporate clients and with few exceptions they uniformly prohibit FF, Chrome & Safari. There is a strong desire to target a particular browser and fine tune applications on the corporate intranets for that browser and be done with it. Developer time is too costly to be fiddling around with the HTML and CSS to make it look right on other browsers, when there are other business applications to write and time/budgets are a premium…And Macs/Safari in the business world, take a number and sit down cuz you’re in for a loooong wait.

      • HonestBWF

        As much as I agree with the overall comments on IE 7 and IE 6 particularly. There is a place where IE 8 and IE 9 live and dominate. And that’s in corporate intranets. As a consultant, I see countless corporate clients and with few exceptions they uniformly prohibit FF, Chrome & Safari. There is a strong desire to target a particular browser and fine tune applications on the corporate intranets for that browser and be done with it. Developer time is too costly to be fiddling around with the HTML and CSS to make it look right on other browsers, when there are other business applications to write and time/budgets are a premium…And Macs/Safari in the business world, take a number and sit down cuz you’re in for a loooong wait.

      • HonestBWF

        As much as I agree with the overall comments on IE 7 and IE 6 particularly. There is a place where IE 8 and IE 9 live and dominate. And that’s in corporate intranets. As a consultant, I see countless corporate clients and with few exceptions they uniformly prohibit FF, Chrome & Safari. There is a strong desire to target a particular browser and fine tune applications on the corporate intranets for that browser and be done with it. Developer time is too costly to be fiddling around with the HTML and CSS to make it look right on other browsers, when there are other business applications to write and time/budgets are a premium…And Macs/Safari in the business world, take a number and sit down cuz you’re in for a loooong wait.

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    • kim4true

      I wish every version of IE would die. I’m now having to rewrite my style sheets to accommodate IE 9. Why must they be so contrary??!! Is it simple greed? Fortunately I almost never run  into IE6 or IE 7 users any more. While I did recently have a client on IE 7, he was fine with the fact that he couldn’t see the website correctly because his computer is so old as long as his clientele could see the site as it was intended to appear.

    • bfkkb

      I am one of those who refuses to move up from IE6. In my role as a consultant, I find it extremely annoying that Microsoft continues to ignore standards from the entire world in their browser development. That being said, IE7 and IE8 are not compatible with many older versions of their own products (SharePoint for example). When stability is necessary, I had to stay with tried and true no matter how much I hate it. I will do testing on other computers using higher versions, but let’s face it, you always have to have some kind of Microsoft “fix” for any web design.

    • musher2004

      How come the usage share of web browsers you’re giving in this article ARE SOOOO DIFFERENT from the ones we can find in Wikipedia (median) at:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table

      Please? What’s your source of information?

    This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 2:54 am and is filed under DesignFloat, Web Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.Both comments and pings are currently closed.

    August 16th, 2011 in DesignFloat, Web Browsers
    15 Comments