EronInJapan

I was amused to come across this post which talked about the Save The Developers campaign. The campaign notified users of IE6 who visited the site that by upgrading their browser to IE7 they could save web developers all over the world a lot of headaches and frustration. Any web developers out there will know how much time and effort it usually takes to ensure that your design is compatible with Internet Explorer 6. It’s usually not a fun experience and it does limit what can be done on your site if you want to ensure 100% backwards compatibility.

I was hoping to take a look at the Save The Developers website but the domain (http://savethedevelopers.org/) seems to have expired and is now being parked. Darn.

Searching the web, I was able to find some information on current browser statistics from the popular web developer site W3Schools. More detailed browser statistics look to be available from other websites which require a paid subscription but I’ll stick with what I can find for free for now.  Please be aware that these statistics only include visitors to the W3Schools website.

Glad to see that IE6 keeps losing market share, but it looks like it’s web developers will need to continue supporting it for some time to come.

Another ray of hope from Asa Dotzler at Mozilla. He wrote here that usage of IE6 has been surpassed by IE8, making IE6 the least popular IE still in widespread use. Good news. He then goes on in another post here about his browser predictions where states that he expects IE6 to be virtually non-existent by the end of 2010. I can only hope that he’s right!