Apple have a service which (amongst other things) allows web-based access to emails, calendar and contacts. Yesterday, they announced that the service (previously called .mac) is being relaunched as mobile me.
37signals reports on something interesting about the relauch. Apple have stated that they won’t be supporting IE6. There’s speculation that a major player like Apple (re)launching a major web app like this without IE6 support may herald the beginning of the end for IE6. I dunno if that’s true, but I think it’s fair to say that we (along with web developers eveywhere) certainly hope so.
Because of its poor support for web standards like CSS, IE6 adds time to the development of websites and applications. Sometimes not much, sometimes a lot. It’s probably on the receiving end of more in-office rants than anything else here at White October. But unfortunately for us, loads of people still use it and if our sites don’t work or look rubbish in it, then our clients’ users will, likely as not, simply move on and never return.
But how many people really use it? I logged on to Google Analytics and grabbed some rough and ready recent stats for our own site and that of one of our clients. Here’s the all browsers breakdown for the White October site:
and of the 40 (ish) % of those using IE, here’s the breakdown of versions:
So, a significant number of IE6 users. And here’s our client, all browsers first:
(interesting to see PS3 in there but what is BDUE when it’s at home?!). And (bearing in mind that 86% are IE users) the IE breakdown:
A similar %age of IE6 users but more overall since there are significantly more users using IE on the client’s site than ours.
Obviously these are very quickly grabbed stats from which I’d be wary of drawing significant conclusions, but I think it’s fair to say that we’d have a hard job justifying choosing to not support IE6.
So here’s to hoping that more big companies and sites make big public announcements about not supporting IE6 so that we can finally send all our ie6.css stylesheet files to the recycle bin (and then empty the recycle bin).