Blimey. I didn’t realise that Facebook are trending down support for IE6. The “new look” is disabled, and if you use the old look you get a big message complaining about your browser choice:
Two interesting things here: first, they recommend that you try another
browser, and give a list of Firefox, Safari, and Flock as well as
“upgrade to Internet Explorer 7”. Flock? I bet the Opera people are a
bit hacked off about that. Second: there have been a few cases so far of
people dropping support for IE6 (MobileMe, not that that really
counts because all its users are Mac people, and 37 Signals, ditto),
but nothing remotely as high-profile as Facebook. This is the boot
starting to descend, I think. IE6 is already the bugbear of the industry
(and has been for some time: I said “Internet Explorer is the new
Netscape 4” in 2005 and I was hardly the first!); how long before we
see support for it drop to Netscape 4 levels of “you get the unenhanced
non-JavaScript version”? I’d like to see more people publish browser
stats for their websites. Yes, they’re unreliable, yes people change
their user agent, blah blah blah. They’ll give us an indication, though;
how many people out there are using IE6? Google Analytics tells me that
36% of my visitors are using IE, and 37% of those are using IE6, which
means that IE6 visitors to my site are down to under 15%. (If you’re not
using Analytics, analog -G -A +a +B <apache logfile>
will give you a
browser list, as will many other things.) Other people will doubtless
differ, and I’d be thoroughly interested in seeing more of these
percentages from sites with a different user-base to mine. If you’re a
company, tell us what percentage of your users are using IE6! We’re not
going to get stats out of Google or Yahoo or the BBC, but non-behemoths
will do fine here. Everyone else, start thinking: where’s the cut-off
point? How low does IE6’s market share need to go before it’s reasonable
to not devote extra development time to it? “Extra” is the keyword there
— people thinking “hey, Opera/Safari/Firefox 3/IE8 has less than 15%
market share in my statistics, let’s cut them off, Mr. Microsoft
Hater” need to consider that modern browsers don’t (or at least
shouldn’t) take any extra development time to work around their
idiosyncrasies. (In practice, Safari does require more extra development
time than I’d like, I find, but its market share is high enough (or the
idiosyncracies are infrequent enough) that supporting it is broadly
worth the effort.) So: if you have IE6 stats, publish them. If you’re a
web hacker: when should we cut off the ailing IE6’s life support? Speak now…