10% of the population of the world use IE6, but that is heavily weighted by countries such as China (34%) and South Korea (22%)
If your target audience is English-speaking or European countries, the relevant proportion is 2% to 3% or less.
That's a pretty good level to start to consider whether supporting that small percentage is actually making you more money than you would if you didn't support their browser.
Does anyone know why Asia has such a high level of IE6 usage? I don't think it has to do with the computers being old, because IE6 usage is relatively high even in developed places like Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
A major reason in South Korea is that in the late 90s, the government mandated the use of ActiveX for online banking. This was only recently repealed, and the Korean government is now encouraging people to move on.
The government mandate encouraged many websites to also use ActiveX. South Korea is probably the only country where ActiveX is still in use. Internet Explorer has a browser share of 90-95% in Korea. IE6 is about 15-20% of this.
A clarification on Korea's ActiveX problem: Korea mandated 128 bit encryption via the use of an ActiveX control or plugin, but when Netscape bit the dust, there was no reason to update that plugin anymore.
Well, 10% of the world also uses Macs, but people don't seem to support that as much. Why not? Because it depends on the target demographic. IE6 usage is probably a lot higher in the corporate environments and thus matters to websites targeted at the corporate world, just like how if you're not targeting hip 20somethings, Mac support is unnecessary.
I do consulting and have been in many offices of large corporations in NYC, and I have not seen IE6 on a corporate PC in maybe 5 years. Macs on the other hand are practically neck-and-neck with PCs from what I have seen.
My image of an IE6 user is a 50 year old housewife with a spyware-invested eMachines they bought in 2002. I'm sure in other countries this could be very different but that has been my experience in the US.
I would love to stop supporting ie6 but I develop for customers in China and on the last count from our logs over 60% accessed the service with ie6. ( which, surprisingly, is about double of what is shown on your link )
Hmmm... Let us look a little closer at that map. 2% of the US uses IE6. The numbers in Europe are pretty low too. This doesn't make sense..oh wait... China and South Korea are skewing the numbers. They're not important for our site, it's ok to drop IE6 support.
"We should stop supporting IE6"
"What percentage of people use IE6?"
"10%"
"Hmm, 10% sounds like a lot of people ... let's support it!"