There has been a lot of chat on the interweb recently about not supporting IE6, or at least offering a poorer experience for ease of development (which is what it essentially boils down to).  I don’t agree with this, I think if people want to use a rubbish browser, let them, but don’t lock them out! We can try and educate them into an upgrade, but we should never force them into it.

Anyway, back to my weekly technology report.  I thought it might be a good exercise to take our broad cross section of browser data and put it into some form of readable chart so that we can hopefully draw some conclusions as to when IE6 will no longer become an issue.  This is what the “women of the UK” web browser statage looks like:

Graph to show main browser usage.

Graph to show browser usage excluding IE7

If we then add a trend line to the IE6 line:

Graph to show browser usage with IE6 trendline

The trend line intersects point the x-axis at 04/08/2010.

We’re not that far away from washing our hands with IE6 – a little over 12 months if you follow the trend! I wouldn’t get too excited just yet though, I very much doubt it will entirely bottom out as there will still be the anti-upgrade brigade, and those that can’t because of real or perceived barriers. This will mean that progressive enhancement will remain just as important as it is now for the foreseable future. We must be careful as conscientious developers not to bov IE6 off and jack-off over our canvas elements just yet.

Further reading:
John Resig raises some good points in his post Determining Browser Market Share