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

[Sheryl]

Brian Vuyk wrote:

> 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?

Depends to a great extent upon whether you're supporting a generic-enough
site to use generic statistics.  It would be better if you used
site-specific or at least target market-specific statistics in order to
see if the effort is worth it on the particular site you're working on.

A few years ago I participated in a similar discussion on a different
list.  I used the example of statistics from my own job site, which was an
engineering school getting a significant number of students from overseas.
 Because of the engineering aspect a lot of people were on linux boxes
compared to the general population and because of the overseas aspect
significant numbers of people were on relatively old OSs and thus using
older IE.  If we had developed our sites based on generic statistics we
would have been unviewable for 40 per cent of our target audience. 
Similarly, last I looked sites aimed at graphic designers would be viewed
overwhelmingly by people on Macs so Safari and Firefox would predominate.

I don't have specifics (someone mentioned Windows 2K) but I would bet that
there would be specific markets that would skew the statistics in favor of
IE 6.

Sheryl