I think this is great, personally. The only things more I'd wish for from this site:
* It'd be great if it was more clear that Microsoft itself was behind the site (there's just one little logo at the bottom left).
* The home page seems targeted at developers. It'd be great if they had another page targeted specifically at end users spelling out in clear terms why a.) it's bad for them to still be using IE6 (e.g. throw some scary warnings about viruses in there) and b.) what they can do about it (e.g. upgrade or install an alternative browser if upgrade not possible.)
* Now that I think about it, they need another page like the one above but targeted at enterprises. Again, lay out in clear terms all the horrible reasons for using IE6 on the open Internet. Convince them to install alternative browsers on desktops for general browsing and to restrict the use of IE6 to only those specialized applications which absolutely require it.
My wish list is probably already three items too long, so I think I'll quit while I'm ahead.
When in doubt: whois ie6countdown.com (edit: I originally misread your comment as saying, "i don't believe it's Microsoft cause the small logo is unconvincing" -- sorry)
Registrant:
Microsoft Corporation
Domain Administrator
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
US
Email: domains@microsoft.com
Registrar Name....: CORPORATE DOMAINS, INC.
Registrar Whois...: whois.corporatedomains.com
Registrar Homepage: www.cscprotectsbrands.com
Domain Name: ie6countdown.com
Created on..............: Fri, Aug 07, 2009
Expires on..............: Tue, Aug 07, 2012
Record last updated on..: Thu, Mar 03, 2011
Administrative Contact:
Microsoft Corporation
Domain Administrator
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
US
Phone: +1.4258828080
Email: domains@microsoft.com
Technical Contact:
Microsoft Corporation
MSN Hostmaster
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
US
Phone: +1.4258828080
Email: msnhst@microsoft.com
DNS Servers:
ns1.msft.net
ns4.msft.net
ns5.msft.net
ns2.msft.net
ns3.msft.net
Thats ok because after I code for Firefox or Chrome, my work is done and my employer and myself can get onto the next project. The cost and losses having to develop/support all IEs(maybe not 9) is enormous.
There should be a website where all coders go to detail how much extra time they had to spend to make their code work in IE and every six months the site sends Microsoft a bill for lost time & productivity!
The point being that if Ford tells you your Toyota is dangerous then you are likely to ignore them due to bias, but if Toyota tell you your Toyota is dangerous you would listen.
Say you were interviewing someone and their resume looks great. You talk to them and feel the same way, and are ready to hire them. The fact that Knuth calls you and says, "this was my best student in 20 years" is only icing on the cake--you were going to hire him anyway.
It's a good PR move for MS, and one that will hopefully help them in their apparent goal to win devs back over. More importantly, for some random stumbling across the site, a prominent statement that this is MS's idea would be more likely to get them to upgrade than if it appeared to be some random site. The IE8 bit is highly unfortunate, though.
A lot of users don't understand the concept of a browser. 'Internet Explorer' is that thing they use to get to their internet. "What the hell is this Morzilla, I want my Internet!"
I don't understand how jokes (while funny) and snide comments get upvoted more than relevant information. I upvoted your whois post. Thanks for saving me whois time.
Couldn't anyone register a domain with that info though? Obviously not the name servers though if they want the domain to resolve to their site. Just curious.
I think it might be too much for Microsoft to say "you have to get rid of this browser" and then "but you have to upgrade your operating system". For the same reason they're not going to promote FF or Chrome, since those run on XP just fine.
It'd be great if it was more clear that Microsoft itself was behind the site
There are a couple of dead giveaways: IE is the only browser they mention share for, and IE is the only browser they give a download link for, and the fact that they call it "Windows Internet Explorer".
I was about to "like" the page, but the like button is for facebook.com/internetexplorer. Liking ie6countdown.com means you like Internet Explorer. That's the opposite effect from what I was expecting.
Anyone know the story behind IE6's huge presence in Asia (especially China)? Why haven't they upgraded? Is it because Windows XP is still very popular? If so, why? Also, is there a popular "native-land" browser, the way Xunlei is the most popular BitTorrent client in the world?
Piracy might be one of the reasons. But there is another possible reason - underpowered machines. Unlike the western world, owning a computer is still a luxury here (India). Most people are stuck with old machines where firefox and chrome are terribly slow.
I was expecting India to have a much higher share. But as statcounter's stats[1] suggests, chrome already has ~25% share. IE in general and IE6 in particular are losing market share drastically. This is a welcome trend.
Are FF and later versions of IE really slower than IE6? I remember IE6 with QQ toolbar being literally unusable for me before I gave my then colleague's laptop a lease of life by upgrading her browser to IE7 (sans toolbar) for the ActiveX-dependent extensions and Firefox 3 for everything else.
Mostly I'd assume it's a function of IE-specific code in webapps and pre-XP OS installations that means that IE6 is not only required but necessary for some purposes.
I'm also guessing Maxthon[1] has a large browser share in China and you'll notice that MSIE6 is in its userstring[2], which could possibly be diluting the results for pure IE6 instead of those with the same engine (Trident[3]).
This would certainly explain the market share of IE in general, but IE 7, 8 and 9 each support ActiveX as well, so I can't imagine that alone is a factor.
No, the problem is Internet cafe and pubs. They contribute the largest proportion of Chinese Internet users. And they all have a very special something: 还原卡[1]. Basically it's a either software or hardware controls INT 13H, so all data write to HDD is dropped once system is reboot, and the system is as clean as a fresh system install. And yes, they all have pirated Windows XP SP2 with outdated software/games installed years ago and the admin don't bother to upgrade their system because "nothing is broken". Some of the applications defintely requires and regular upgrade, like anti-virus software and MMORPGs, often they use a network mapped drive to a LAN server. So everyone gets a latest version while the OS partition remains static for years.
IDK why 还原卡 is so popular in China, nearly every public computer has one. Perhaps it's because virus and malware are so rampant in China.
And for Maxthon, it use the system default WebBrowser control, so it's version agnostic, it can be either IE5, 5.5, 6, 7 or 8.
That's certainly one factor. I remember how annoyed I was when developing a hostel website for a friend that I'd have to support IE6, due to the wide install base. Then my friend tried using it in this weird new browser which she said was popular - I was happy that Chinese people were being persuaded to switch from IE. Then I discovered that Maxthon used the Trident layout engine and had inherited all the IE layout problems. Aaargh!
Still, I don't think Maxthon explains everything - I have seen a lot of cyber cafes with only IE6 installed. I'll try and make an extra effort to promote Chrome/Firefox/heck, even IE9 next time I'm over there.
You are kidding me right? Most of the Cyber Cafes use very powerful machine to support games like Crysis. That's why Cyber Cafes exists and popular.
But there are also cheap Cyber Cafes, which their system really sucks. People can not afford a computer go there, and they don't really care what a browser is.
This might just be me, but when I scan over a map, my automatic action is to hover my mouse over the countries I'm looking at (I do the same with my finger when I look at a physical map). If I do that here though, the map disappears.
I can't stop myself from doing it. It's driving me nuts.
Heh. Same this happened to me. Took so much time to load that I thought there was something wrong. Clicked on your link and the image/link was cached. Now, it shows up instantaneously when I mouse over in the main site.
From the page:
"As of February 2011, 12% of the world was using
Internet Explorer 6, which was 9%
lower than the previous year"
They're using NetApps stats. IE6's share was 21 percent in February of 2010, according to those numbers. That means IE6 share has gone down 43 percent in the past year. I'm guessing the author doesn't know the difference between percentages and percentage points.
Internet Explorer 9 is only available for Windows 7 and Vista. However, we still recommend you download the latest version of Internet Explorer for XP. Get it here:
That's what I see when I click their "Download IE9" link. Looks like we'll get to go through this all again in a few years.
IE8 is going to be the IE6 of today, but way way way worse and for much longer. Talk about legacy code.
While IE6 has been a pain for 5 years, IE8 will be a pain for 15. We will see a HUGE portion of people not upgrading from WinXP.
Really our only solution there is to get them onto a new browser or convince them that this unsuspecting "Chrome Frame" plugin is the right thing to do.
Why will a huge portion of people not upgrade from XP? It's been at long time since you could buy a computer with it preinstalled (unless you specifically ask for it). Hardware attrition, upgrade cycles, and hopefully the end of the global recession should clear out those machines.
Any computer that came with XP preinstalled that is still around 15 years later is going to be so slow that an outdated browser is going to be the least of its worries.
Not so long as you think… Microsoft licensed XP for free on netbooks to compete with Linux (netbooks cost maybe twice as much as a Windows license). Summer of 2009, I walked into a Verizon store and they were selling netbooks that, swear to God, had IE6 as the default browser. In 2009!
XP installation packages, even updated through the last service pack (SP3), only ever came with IE6. You have to actively download and install IE 7 or 8. Not too surprising if the netbook vendors trying to compete on rock-bottom price didn't want to pay an installation monkey to do that. If you don't know what a browser version is, you're not a lost sale. If you do, you know you can easily upgrade it and you're still not a lost sale.
Is that a fact? I think I installed XP with IE7 straight off the disk once. Maybe it was slip-streamed. Hardly seems like a lot of work for the netbook OEMs to create a slipstreamed install with IE7/8.
A question you have to ask is, "Are people that are still running Windows XP a market for my product?" If your product is software, it seems highly unlikely.
Paul, granted that it's sort of a part of your job to shill for Chrome, and granted that Chrome is a better browser than IE in its current state, but why all the hate for IE8 specifically? Most devs I know who've spent time with the IE lineup would prefer 15 years of IE8 to another 1 year of IE6. End of story, so far as that goes. (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much.)
And the "only" solution is hardly getting them onto a new browser. Moving them to say, Firefox, is only one solution. Another solution would be for MS to produce a standards-compliant browser. IE8 and IE9 are both major steps in this direction. Of course, Chrome itself isn't 100% compliant, and had the advantage of being developed much later in the game, against a well-framed open source stack. And of course, Chrome borrowed all sorts of tricks from IE...
Anyway, there are at least 3 or 4 good solutions for that crowd, only one of which involves Chrome. By the way, I use Chrome and Firefox exclusively. I dislike the piling-on against IE for piling on's sake. To represent IE8 as another IE6 is a little disingenuous, IMO. For what it's worth.
Paul, can you maybe lean on people at Google to create & test a few versions of a Chrome Frame download page that is highly convincing to end users? The Chrome Frame page is kinda sorta developer-centric. There needs to be one well-linked-to page that is only, and convincingly, targeted to everyday bumpkins using IE.
> a Chrome Frame download page that is highly convincing to end users
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only people who should be installing Chrome Frame are IT departments in control of hundreds or thousands of desktops that are forced to maintain IE6 because of legacy/vertical applications.
"End users" should, at least for computers they own, be convinced to install a complete browser like everyone else.
Since sites opt in to Chrome Frame using the same X-UA-Compatible mechanism Microsoft introduced for IE7/8 emulation, it shouldn’t be breaking anything — even (especially!) “legacy/vertical applications.”
Added: Heck, why not one targeted toward IT admins, too :)
That's the most annoying thing about the page. If Microsoft really cared about getting people off of IE and onto something modern, they'd also offer alternatives for browsers which ran on XP beyond IE8.
I don't necessarily begrudge MS for not making IE9 run on XP... it can be hard to write code for older platforms, especially when you live entirely in the new one. But other browser makers are making their code work on XP, and they should be promoted as valid choices.
This just feels like a way to browbeat people into upgrading to Windows 7 rather than solving the real problem.
A good number of people in the tech world hate MS, at least partially, and IE6 has been one of the influential reasons for this hatred. Till date, a lot of people avoid IE like the plague and even the modern IE browsers have suffered because of the tarnished brand image. People need to understand that IE6 is a decade old browser and heck it was a good browser for its time. People not moving away from the browser has been a bigger cause of pain than MS itself. This is a good initiative by Microsoft.
Last time I checked, "Genuine advantage" validation was not required for installing newer IE, as well as critical updates. It was, for a time, but then Microsoft let installing never versions of IE regardless of Genuine advantage.
The linked article doesn't provide any evidence for correlation of pirated Windows and outdated Windows(or IE).
True, but pirated Windows does not allows you to update automatically, and does not updates IE for you. Now, one can always download newer IE from Microsoft's website and manually install it, but chances of that happening are low.
While it's a very good thing MS is endorsing this, they are very incongruent. They continuosly state that they love the web, that IE9 will deliver a more beautiful web and all that stuff.
But here we are. We have a 10-year old browser that still has a huge 12% global usage. Ok, that was a huge error, the good thing it's that MS is actually doing something, but are they learning from the past? I think they don't.
What will IE9 look like in 5 years? I think it will likely be just like IE6-- holding back the web. A little less, but still, barely support for basic CSS3 declarations, struggling with HTML5, no offline web applications, with no history.pushState support, using still old web forms and much more.
IE6 was great for its time. We have learned a lot from it, but the one thing everyone gets is that no matter how good you make it, it will get old. That's the real problem, there's no an easy way to upgrade those users or give them an alternative for their needs (like a standalone version for corporative software crapiness). And IE9 is heading in the same direction.
Before we get to being stuck on IE9, first we're going to have to survive being stuck on IE8 - the last version of IE supported in XP.
One of the reasons for being stuck on IE6 is that it's the last IE supported by Windows 2000 (and there are plenty of Windows 2000 workstations still out there).
I blame customers for poor adoption, not developers. Its obvious that MSFT would prefer all of their customers update to the newest versions of their software.
There are a few possible reasons for Microsoft to put IE9 on Windows XP that I can imagine. The first ones that come to mind (all hypothetical, incidentally): (1) it would, somehow, earn them money, (2) they have contractual obligations to do it, or (3) they get their giggles from updating a decade-old operating system.
1 seems unlikely. 2 also seems unlikely, since if they had a legal obligation to put IE9 on XP, they would probably be putting IE9 on XP. 3 seems deeply implausible.
I suggest that the largest group of people who care about this is not users or companies but web developers. If this is true, then Microsoft has no motive to put IE9 on Windows XP, and plenty of motives not to.
>"[...]a few possible reasons for Microsoft to put IE9 on Windows XP that I can imagine."
How about demonstrating that they care about UX of current users. They care about good internet experience and they care that their users don't have to use someone else’s free software to still have a vaguely secure and usable internet experience. Or simply just as an opportunity to showcase MS's improvements to their apps and demonstrate the great benefits (ahem) to updating to newer versions of other apps. It could also be a ready advertising opportunity in many countries, have the homepage fixed to an MS page with upgrade offers and info if you're on a legacy OS version. Lastly as a way to softarm Bing as being the default search engine of millions of business users.
Why not design it to work on XP, OSX and Linux from the off? The other browser makers seem to manage it. Perhaps they secretly feel they can't contend in the browser space?
IE9 was built from the ground up to use technologies like DirectWrite, GPU Accel. etc. Porting all these to XP would not be trivial. I guess MS wants to nudge people off that platform so that software can start using new technologies instead of getting stuck in 2001.
Anyway, they supported it till IE8 and MS has one of the best track records for backward compatibility(if not the best) in the industry. Just see Apple to see how quickly things are deprecated.
I am sure developing IE is an enormous cost since MS has to be careful about not breaking corporate software. The benefit to them by making it for OS X and Linux would be negligible or even negative (how many would even install it? Most run those OSes because they don't like MS).
>"IE9 was built from the ground up to use technologies like DirectWrite, GPU Accel. etc. Porting all these to XP would not be trivial."
Indeed, hence why I asked why not design it to work (even in a limited form) with other platforms from the off. I realise going backwards now is not really possible what I was questioning was the original decision.
>I am sure developing IE is an enormous cost since MS has to be careful about not breaking corporate software.
Couldn’t they plug in the past DLLs as other apps do so as to render as if it were IE6 under XP(SP2) or whatever?
--
OT :you say "Most run those OSes because they don't like MS". Do you think this is true? I'd have thought the majority run OSX for [perceived] usability or possibly lifestyle reasons and maybe Linux for price reasons. Personally I run Linux based on a mixture of ease of usability and price. Despite being vehemently against MSIE (due to time served web developing) I thought MSIE8 was quite good and should it be available for my distro I'd give it a trial despite being pretty entrenched with FF. It's not really me that I'd see them marketing too though.
Alot of that is also large enterprises that wont upgrade. Where my brother works, the mindset is that you dont need to browse the web at work so there is no need for a "modern" browser.
Until an approved program uses the built in HTML renderer for a news page or help file or something, and calls out to the web and gets the whole system compromised within minutes.
Very easy to happen.
Windows lets programs do whatever they want. Just because you don't actively use them doesn't mean they aren't used by other programs.
(This is also why Linux server admins like to pull every single command and program out of their machine that they don't absolutely need.)
I hope Microsoft has learned lessons from how difficult it has been to get people to stop using IE6. Mainly, they need to make it easier to upgrade IE.
IE needs to be a standalone application that can be upgraded easily without the risk of breaking everything.
They need to learn a lesson about wantonly pushing proprietary technology when perfectly fine standardized solutions already exist. I suspect they haven't learned anything though.
I was going to write something about hoping those developers choke on a bucket of something but decided better of it. ;-) I'm a little pissed after years of fighting with web sites that require Internet Explorer because the developers were retards and used some proprietary MSIE shit.
>They need to learn a lesson about wantonly pushing proprietary technology when perfectly fine standardized solutions already exist. I suspect they haven't learned anything though.
I think they did learn. Keep in mind that back in IE4/5 era when most of that stuff was created, they were competing against Netscape 4.
If they did learn anything, it has been a slow process. The <canvas> tag for example, was introduced in Safari 1.3 and has been supported in Firefox since 1.5, Opera since version 9, and in all versions of Chrome. Contrast that with IE. The <canvas> tag is not supported by IE until version 9. If you want to do any cool <canvas> graphics in versions before 9, you'll have to use something like ExplorerCanvas at http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/, which of course mean more conditional IE comments in you HTML, and more pain for web developers.
Even non-tech savy consumers get's their browsers updated once they buy a new machine.
But enterprise on the other hand. Boy is that a different story. They will on purpose maintain IE6 for as long as they can because they simply cannot even begin to deal with the support issues when switching.
If you want to make a lot of money on a one off. Develop a method for large enterprise to switch without the headache.
It's very confusing and unobvious what the percentages are percents of: the country's percentage of total IE6 users, or the IE6 users' percentage of the country? Based on the fact that they add to >100%, I guess that the per country numbers you get when you hover the map are % of that country still using IE6.
But then what are the percents on the ring/pie chart to the side? They don't add to 100%, so they're not percentages of the pie (total IE6 users). But China's percentage there (5.9) doesn't match its percentage in the map (34.5). So, 5.9% of what?
I agree that it's a bad graphic. I think this is what the numbers mean:
On map: percentage of people in that country that use IE6. If there were 300 million people in USA, and 30 million people use IE6 means 10% would show up for USA
On ring: percentage of the world population that uses IE6. If the world population was 6 billion, and 30 million people in USA use IE6, then 0.5% would show up in the ring on the right. It would be better if the ring were bigger, and made to show the 88% of the world that doesn't use IE6 as a gray color.
Forget about IE6, countdown to IE7 instead. Still craps up alot of CSS, forcing designers like me to hack around, use graphics instead of CSS, both or create a sub-experience to a large audience.
Unless IE8 is running in IE7 compatibility mode, something you as a web developer can not always control, in which case you have just confused a user or made it look like you don't understand what you are doing (his site says I should run IE8 and I already do, isn't he thick!).
- Turkey is purple on the map, despite being within the 1-5% (blue) bracket.
- According to the map, Finland has 0.7% IE6 users, but according to the list you get when you hover over the map, it has 0.9%
That aside, it puzzles me that the numbers in East Asia are that high. South Korea and Japan are both wealthy countries with a large number of Internet users. Even if we exclude North America and Western Europe, Eastern Europe does far better, for instance, than South Korea and Japan.
IE market share in general is higher in East Asia, for a few reasons:
1) In the case of S. Korea, until recently ActiveX was
required to do any internet banking (required by law,
iirc).
2) Trident is the only major rendering engine that
supports vertical text. This is not a big deal for
Western users, but might be for East Asia.
I can't speak to the relative market share of IE6 inside the IE slice of the usage pie, though....
MS really don't help themselves though. My company won't upgrade from IE7 because they are worried about breaking a legacy,critical web-app. If MS could build a feature into IE9 that allowed you to specify a white-list of URLs/domains (set by AD group policy) that always used the IE6/IE7/IE9 renderer/js engine for the tab it was opened in - boom corporates could start upgrading. It's also holding back adoption of Windows 7.
That exists, it's called 'Compatibility Mode'. And by default (at least in IE8, at my current client's deployment) it uses it for all Intranet Sites. You can also use meta-tag 'X-UA-Compatible' to force a certain compatibility (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).as...)
EDIT: Apparently the best you can do for IE6 is to 'emulate IE5,' which actually means 'emulate IE7 quirks mode'. Oh well...
I suspect it's not quite as easy as that, but you still have a very good point. I wonder why they haven't pursued this path actually - It would be a very Microsoft-ish solution.
Interesting... if you get rid of China and S. Korea, IE6 is probably less then 5%. I think IE6 is close to becoming a footnote. With IE9 not supporting XP, I'd love to see MS recommend FF4 or Chrome for XP users, although frankly I don't think it would matter... if you're still on XP a modern web browser is the last thing on your mind.
"If you're still on XP a modern web browser is the last thing on your mind."
I call BS. Tons of people are still on XP and see no reason to switch. Both corporate and non-corporate alike. XP was selling new licenses at least through last summer (last time I purchased brand new, name brand computers with XP pre-installed.) Those actually counted as Win7 sales from M$ perspective, though.
If you're using an OS that is a 10 year old walking security nightmare, I have trouble believing that you also are thinking, "I want to use the modern web". It's like being in the midst of being mugged and wondering, "did I have 3 square meals today?" Sure eating well is important, but using an outdated insecure OS really should be top of mind.
And if you bought XP last summer... well that was your call. XP was acceptable in 2002. It's 2011.
Come on, have you even used XP since 2002? It is not a "security nightmare" if used (or set up) by someone with a minimal amount of knowledge about computer security. These days, with Microsoft's free Security Essentials package, virtually everyone has a decent security package, for example.
WinXP doesn't have several of the security features in newer versions of Windows. And even those it does have aren't as good. Such as buffer overflow protection was updated in Win7, but not since XPSP2 for XP.
It's fundamentally less secure top to bottom. Which is why there is exist many vulnerabilities that exist on XP, but not Win7.
XP is that much less secure than Vista or 7, OK so it has a less capable firewall but my XP installs (and most corporate ones) are sat behind better firewall and other filters than 7 provides. XP is set to get security patches in the same timescales (i.e. not as fast as I'd like in some cases) as Windows 7 until its official EOL in Q2 2014. I will upgrade from XP to 7 some time in 2013, or when there is a compelling reason for me to do so other then XP is due to lose security update support.
Sticking with XP does not mean I don't want (or can't have) a modern browser. FF and Chrome both happily support XP, I'll get my modern browsing experience that way if MS is incapable of supporting its own OS. The problem with XP not being supported by IE9 is that corporates (or home users) who have (or think they have) some reason not to use something other than IE (or use something else in conjunction with IE) are stuck with IE8.
Upgrading from XP to something newer is not a five minute task. Corporate environments require a lot of testing before a simple update goes out sometimes, so a whole OS change is not a small job. Even for me as a home user it is significant hassle: you can't do an in-place upgrade so I'd have to completely reinstall the OS, re-install and reconfigure all my apps, restore all my data from backups, and so forth. Why would I volunteer for all that work if there wasn't a compelling reason? My work time is quite costly and my personal time, while having no monetary value associated with it, is valuable to me in a number other significant ways. And that is without mentioning I'd have to pay for that upgrade I don't particularly need (and hey, that money is needed, there is vodka and cake to buy!).
I know there are reasons for upgrading but they are not compelling reasons for me. Better firewall? I've got one thanks. Better browser? I've got two of those. DX10/DX11? I'm not that much of a gamer that the difference matters and if a game turns up that doesn't support DX9 I'll just not buy it until I have other reason to install a newer Windows (by which time it'll be in a bargain bucket instead of costing £30+£100 for the game plus Windows) if I ever buy it at all. Interface improvements? Nice as they may be, I can certainly live without them.
To add my own bad analogy to the collection in this thread: upgrading from XP just to be able to run a better browser then IE8 is like saving 2p per gallon of petrol by taking a 1000 mile round trip to get to the cheapest pump in the country.
XP was selling new licenses at least through last summer
In fact you can still purchase Windows licenses with the right to downgrade to XP, and will be able to for the life of Windows 7.
I'm a sysadmin and I'm perfectly happy with XP for at least the next year or two. There's no great benefit from Windows 7 that would justify the major effort of reviewing all of our software for compatibility.
Indeed, I missed that useful chart on the side. I tried to quickly just do the math in my head with estimates on total usage for the countries. I was off by about .8% -- thought it would be about 4.8%.
I am a computer savvy user who used Linux as my primary OS for several years (I switched to Windows for reasons I won't specify). If my university didn't provide Windows 7 to me for free, I'd still be using XP. It's a perfectly usable OS.
Since you didn't specify the reason of your switch, I am going to guess ;)
I think you switched because your university doesn't support Linux :)
On a serious note, at my workplace few people are still using XP when they are free and encouraged to upgrade to Win7, then I guess some people out there are just not willing to change.
I spent two summers interning at a giant insurance company (no self-installed software was allowed anywhere on the network). In 2008, everyone in the entire company was forced to use IE6. In 2009, they had transitioned to IE7 and developers company-wide were preparing their webapps for a rollout of IE8. Sure, everyone was still on XP, but even the higher-ups had begun to realize how important it was to update the browser.
Disclaimer: My experiences are based on the current german web landscape, so I don't know if this is true for other countries.
I don't include IE6 anymore in my web pages. If it works, ok, if not, well... too bad. In the last year, no customer ever really wanted to have an IE6 site.
The Problem with a site like this from Microsoft is, it is not the normal household PC which is still running IE6. There might be a few, but that number should be close to zero. It is the big companies, who are not switching to a newer version, because they have special software programmed for IE6 with funny activeX elements and big domain stuff behind so they can't simply flip the switch, and if it works, why should they upgrade? They don't want to throw a whole bunch of money at this problem. Thats sad, but you can't do anything about it...
There’s an ultimate deadline on dropping IE6 of April 8th, 2014. That’s when XP, and consequently IE6, fall out of support. Continuing to support sites for browsers that aren’t receiving security updates is actively harmful to users and should be avoided wherever possible.
One of my friends who is a designer, completely sick of IE6, puts this Javascript on every site he develops: http://ie6update.com/
Click: Click here to see a demo!
--------------------
Recently I finished a CSS book, maybe 500 pages long. About 80 or so pages were dedicated to "and to get this to work in IE6, you have to do this hack." IE7 maybe had 10 pages, and IE8/Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera were merely footnotes sprinkled about.
Chinese hackers love IE 6. This would be my guess as to why IE 6 has a higher count there then anywhere else. I don't say this out of spite, our site just uses an exception notification system that floods my inbox with tons of bogus requests from china. They can't all be proxy servers and have a user agent indication IE 6. Just a thought, not meant to be negative...
Maybe older versions of Windows were easier to pirate or more widely pirated, and people avoid upgrading in case they run afoul of anti-piracy measures.
Actually, Windows 7 is significantly easier† to pirate and still get updates than XP and involves far less risk. I won't provide links here, but you can download the ISOs directly from Digital River, guaranteeing that no extra code has snuck its way in and the image is untouched (something that is not the case with most copies on Bittorrent websites, for example).
† If you are a geek, that is - you do have to modify the bootloader or your BIOS, but unlike cracks and other activation work-arounds, it keeps working.
The default for Microsoft's .com sites should probably be the user set browser language. If not the default then a prominent "change to $language" dropdown with the sniffed browser lang as a list-top shortcut.
who chose those colors? unknown & 1-5 % are practically the same, out of order and make it next to impossible to glance over the map without reading the numbers.
i agree the green color is in between them. The color should be in a gradient proportional to the percentage, and unknown obviously does not fit on that scale. It should be off the gradient.
The most important insight: unless you are targeting Asia (namely China and Korea,) you can pretty much dump IE6 support as Facebook and Google have done. The US number is under 3%. I'd like to see a breakdown of that 3%, but I'd guess it's mostly public schools and stodgy companies.
* It'd be great if it was more clear that Microsoft itself was behind the site (there's just one little logo at the bottom left).
* The home page seems targeted at developers. It'd be great if they had another page targeted specifically at end users spelling out in clear terms why a.) it's bad for them to still be using IE6 (e.g. throw some scary warnings about viruses in there) and b.) what they can do about it (e.g. upgrade or install an alternative browser if upgrade not possible.)
* Now that I think about it, they need another page like the one above but targeted at enterprises. Again, lay out in clear terms all the horrible reasons for using IE6 on the open Internet. Convince them to install alternative browsers on desktops for general browsing and to restrict the use of IE6 to only those specialized applications which absolutely require it.
My wish list is probably already three items too long, so I think I'll quit while I'm ahead.