[consulting] At what percentage do you think most new sites will stop supporting IE6?

[Christoph Weber]

Safari is a standards-compliant browser (for the most part, anyway)
and hence supporting it ought to be a non-issue. Furthermore, its v.3
and v.4 are current and supported, regardless of statistics
percentage.

IE6 is not standards-compliant by any stretch of the imagination. It
has been superseded by IE7 and IE8 which are incrementally better.
These two facts change the whole equation: Support of IE6 is only
driven by usage statistics, and there is the temptation to nudge
remaining users by delivering a degraded experience.

As to your original question: The decision whether to fully or
partially support IE6 rests entirely with the site owner and project
manager, and largely depends on the target audience. As a
developer/designer we can only supply facts and arguments supporting a
for/against decision.

My approach is to make my sites first pass all (or most) standards
validations and then worry about IE in its various incarnations.

I despise with a passion sites coded to support specific, named
browsers (with the exception of IE workarounds). We have standards for
a reason.

My 2 cts.
Christoph

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Brian Vuyk<brian at brianvuyk.com> wrote:
> I was just looking at statistics regarding browser usage.
>
> W3Schools shows IE6 usage at 14.5% last month:
> http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
> W3Counter shows IE6 at 24.84% last month:
> http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
>
> Regardless of what the true usage is, all these statistics indicate that
> it's usage is dropping, although not particularly fast.
>
> At what percentage point do you think people will start to consider IE6 to
> be not worth supporting anymore? I know a lot of developers feel that we are
> past that point already due to how obsolete IE6 is. However, most clients
> I've dealt with insist that Safari be supported with ~5% of the market
> share, and IE6 even more so.
>
> Thoughts?
> --
> Brian Vuyk
> Web Design & Development
> T: 613-534-2916
> Skype: brianvuyk
> brian at brianvuyk.com | http://www.brianvuyk.com
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-- 
Christoph Weber
Dialog Consulting
5957 Erlanger St.
San Diego, CA 92122
dialogconsulting.biz
858-623-0318