Developers and site proprietors have been clamoring for the downfall of Internet Explorer 6, with a mock funeral and Google's announcing that it would discontinue support for that 8-year-old, two-versions-ago browser. November traffic numbers from Net Applications today showed that the dated and problematic browser is finally showing strong signs of receding, while users update to newer versions of IE—or even more likely—move to Google's Chrome Web browser.
Microsoft appears just as eager for the troublesome IE6 to go away as anyone, and it seems everyone is finally starting to get their wish (unless you live in China). Roger Capriotti, Microsoft's director of IE product marketing, said in a IE blog entry that one of his missions was to get people off IE6 and onto a newer version "as fast as humanly possible."
Capriotti told PCMag yesterday that one of the major IE6 holdouts, corporate customers, are finally upgrading. In fact, worldwide, overall IE6 market share has dropped below 15 percent for the first time. "We're seeing IE6 dropping even more dramatically in commercial customers," said Capriotti. The blog post notes that usage in that market hit a low of 10.3 percent, compared with the overall IE6 usage of 14.55 percent. Over the last six months, Net Applications data shows that one remaining holdout market is Asia, particularly China, where IE6 usage still remains at a suprising 45.2 percent, but that's still down from 50.5 percent in August.
Here are the salient browser traffic data points from the November Net Applications numbers:
- Overall Internet Explorer market share was at 58.26 percent for November, down from 59.26 in October.
- Firefox declined slightly from 22.82 to 22.75 percent.
- Chrome rose from 8.47 to 9.25 percent.
- IE8 share rose to 34.1 percent from 32.05 percent.
- IE9 beta rose from 0.32 percent to 0.38 percent
- 12.1 percent of Web browsing in organizations with over 50,000 seats comes from IE6.
- Less than 20 percent of Web browsing on commercial XP machines comes from IE6.
Capriotti's blog post also noted a Forrester Research study that said in the year after IE8 launched (April 2009 to March 2010), "Forrester saw IE6 share cut in half on their Web site, dropping from 41 percent to 21.1 percent, and IE8 share multiply from 3.1 percent to 17.3 percent." When I asked whether the change was due to corporate America moving to Windows 7, Capriotti said, "Part of it is Windows 7 upgrades, but a large part of it is people upgrading their browsers from 6 to 8." He further noted that only 20 percent of commercial XP users run IE6.
IE9 Beta Ramping Up
Capriotti also mentioned that the next version of Microsoft's browser, now in public beta, had been downloaded over 15 million times as of late November. The test version now accounts for 0.38 percent of worldwide browser usage, up from 0.32 percent in October. This was over 1.5 times the adoption rate for IE8 beta when it was released in 2008. On tech sites like PCMag.com, the share is higher—this site saw 1.3 percent of readers using IE9 Beta for all of November, up from 1.1 percent in October.
Chrome Coming On Strong
Net Applications sent out a separate press release pointing out that in November, verison 7 of Google's Chrome browser showed the second largest monthly usage share gain in its tracking history, adding 5.64 percent for a total of 8 percent market share. This is no doubt due to Chrome's auto-updating system, which requires no user action for the browser to be updated. As mentioned, Chrome now holds a respectable 9.25 percent of worldwide browser share.