So when should we drop support for IE6?
When looking at global browser statistics, most people tend to focus on the whole rather than their target audience. A good average for this is the fantastic wikipedia entry which takes statistics from a whole range of sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Msieshare1. This claims that current global IE6 usage sits at a lofty 20%, certainly seems like something that can't be ignored.
What this doesn't tell you is exactly where these statistics are based, this is a global average. Most of us don't build sites that need to be used by the global community, we build for a much closer to home audience. For example a UK company doesn't necessarily need to build a site that works for a Chinese audience. Although this obviously depends on the site.
If we look at a more localised view of browser version usage its a different story.
Statcounter.com paints Europe (North America is very similar) in a different light to the global average. There are currently less than 7% of users in Europe still using IE6. This trend continues across most of the west.
The really heavy users remain in Asia and Africa, where usage is between 20% and 30%. This bumps up the global average to the mark we see on most rough statistic sites.
You have to ask the question; would the money you save in the extra development time be more or less than the potential 7% loss of traffic? But you also need to factor in the idea that if users wanted to use your site and couldn't, due to lack of browser support, would they upgrade in order to do so? With big companies like Facebook and Google already taking the leap, how soon before they all follow suit?
We run under the premise that as long as the site is semi-usable in IE6 'that is enough'. Build sites to be standards compliant, if users choose not to use a standards based browser, then they will have to live with a sub-par experience.
Obviously this would need to be decided on a case by case basis, if the site has a history and you have stats to go on already, then these would be the deciding factor.
A big factor in this is the big organisations who decided to build their intranet's and bespoke company software on IE6's completely non-standard engine. Meaning they would be tied in for all time, or until their company software was updated, at a potential massive cost.
There is no real reason these companies can't roll out their workstations with multiple browsers. In fact in many ways it makes sense from a security point of view, using your companies intranet in an isolated browser can only be a good thing right?
Anyway, it's dying, albeit slowly, designers everywhere rejoice.
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