Hot off the news that 37signals is removing support for IE6 in their products I thought it would be interesting to look at the stats from WordPress.com as an update to my previous post just under a year ago. Is it reasonable to drop support for IE6 in a mainstream app?

These stats cover Jan 1 - Jun 30: 787 million “absolute unique” visitors, 1.6 billion visits, and 3.3 billion pageviews. I feel these numbers are large enough and WordPress.com-hosted blogs diverse enough to be fairly representative. All the numbers come from Google Analytics. In parentheses I’ve put the delta from the last time I blogged these stats.

1. 59.41% - Internet Explorer (down 3.05%), sub-breakdown:
1. 53.42% - Version 7.0 (up 18.25%)
2. 46.28% - Version 6.0 (down 17.82%)
3. 0.14% - Version 5.5 (down 0.14%)
2. 32.82% - Firefox (up 2.08%)
3. 4.81% - Safari (up 0.98%)
4. 2.04% - Opera (up 0.26%)
5. 0.41% - Mozilla (down 0.11%)

The operating system breakdown:

1. 89.41% - Windows (down 0.95%)
2. 7.86% - Macintosh (up 1.13%)
3. 1.82% - Linux (down 0.37%)
4. 0.17% - iPhone (out of nowhere!)
5. 0.10% - PlayStation Portable (up 0.07%)

So as you can see, IE6 users account for about 27% of all the visits we saw. If I were building something for “the internet” IE6 compatibility would still very much be on my radar. Everyone’s users or customers are different, and if I saw IE6 falling below 10% on one of my sites I’d probably very seriously consider what 37signals is doing.

The good news is most trends are going in the right direction: strong growth of Firefox, IE7, and Macintosh, and the iPhone came out of nowhere to generate 2.6 million visits (and another 1.1 million from the iTouch).

Die bei Microsoft beherrschen wohl die Webstandards noch nicht so lange

Aber die könnten den 6er ruhig sperren und ein Pflichtupdate verordnen. Konnten sie bei MSN 7.5 ja auch, dann sollte das doch für den IE kein Problem darstellen.

Tja, leider wahr. Ich hab das Ding auch noch aufm Computer um meine Webseiten damit zu testen. Hoffentlich wird das irgendwann überflüssig sein.