Over the Christmas period, I was delighted to see that Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has reached it’s last mile. Users are thankfully ditching the dreaded Internet Explorer 6 in favour of more modern browsers. For web designers, IE6 has been nothing but a big pain in the backside.
You could build a beautiful website that functions perfectly in all modern browsers only to then test it in Internet Explorer 6 and see it fall flat on its face. Web designers and developers across the World have for many years been asking for the beast that is IE6 to be killed off once and for all.
IE6 has created a world in which web developers have been held back from developing innovative websites using the latest coding standards. It has slowed the progress and roll out of some really innovative developments in the Internet Sphere for sometime now.
When we launched our latest website earlier this year, we decided that we would not support users of IE6. We felt that the low traction of 6% was enough to just prompt the user to upgrade their browser rather than allowing them to access our website.
Thankfully it appears that in the US IE6 usage is now below 1% – which is fantastic news!
This statistic prompted me to look deeper into the browser statistics, something I haven’t done for a number of months. The last few months saw Google’s Chrome browser overtake Firefox as being the World’s second most popular browser but that was no surprise. The trends made it look inevitable.
Today I checked out the statistics in Ireland. Although the web is a global entity, a lot of our customers tend to do all if not most of their business in Ireland.
I was surprised to see that Google Chrome is now used by 33.29% of Irish web users, compared to 34.2% of Internet Explorer users. I would now be surprised if Google Chrome didn’t take Internet Explorers crown in January 2012 if the statistics are to be believed.
A lot of Irish web design companies tended to use Internet Explorer as their barometer in terms of testing websites. This was simply because most of their clients would have Internet Explorer installed on their machines by default and would never look any further for an additional browser. Of course, this has all changed now and any web designer worth their weight in gold would definitely have checked the cross browser compatibility of your website.
Either way – do your own testing and make sure your website works in Google Chrome as this is likely to be the most used browser in Ireland come the end of the month!
