I've spent the last 12 months working on the one of the largest sites in Australia. Over this time we have updated our browser support matrix twice, and will probably update it again soon.
For us, IE6 usage is starting to hit a rapid decline, falling at about 1 percentage point a week. The last 3 weeks have been 8.75%, 7.60% and now 6.25%. Considering Chrome is currently unsupported but at 4.57% (and growing), I expect our next update will be to drop IE6 support in favour of adding Chrome support. That being said, the whole site is based on progressive enhancement so it already works in Chrome and we even have a small but consistent set of users browsing on their PS3s. Nevertheless, the decision of which browsers you support (and to what degree you support them) needs to be something that you evaluate and decide yourself using your own market metrics. Anybody who tells you what you should and should not support is most likely an idiot and probably not a very good business person. Thanks, Tatham Oddie au mob: +61 414 275 989, us cell: +1 213 422 7068, skype: tathamoddie, landline: +61 2 8011 3982, fax: +61 2 9475 5172 my business: tixi.com.au Ticketing without the dramas -----Original Message----- From: li...@webstandardsgroup.org [mailto:li...@webstandardsgroup.org] On Behalf Of Steve Green Sent: Monday, 4 January 2010 11:10 AM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: RE: [WSG] google chrome frame In our large-ish corporate environment we're stuck with IE6 as our default probably for another year :( While we know that people have installed newer browsersIE7 is authorised, but not the default--we still can't stop supporting IE6. -------- One of the UK high street banks who has tens of thousands of users recently advised me that they will be retaining IE6 as the default browser until 2014 due to the huge amount of work required to fix the large number of bespoke applications they use. Staff can ask for special dispensation to get IE7 installed but if you've ever tried to get a corporate IT department to do anything you'll understand that very few people will bother asking. I think that techies forget the concerns that ordinary people have about technology. Older users in particular are often reluctant to install or change anything because they don't know what they can trust and they are scared something will break. Unlike us, they don't have the knowledge or facilities to fix anything that goes wrong. I suspect that the kind of websites that ordinary people use will still be seeing significant IE6 traffic (probably in excess of 10%) for a couple more years. The stats for techie sites will be very different, so a decision on whether to support IE6 will depend on the demographics of the visitors. FWIW, one of my team was in Bangalore over Christmas and had to use an Internet café. The machines were running Windows 98! So let's not forget that some parts of the world cannot afford to upgrade as fast as we can. Steve Green ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
