It’s confirmed: For the month of January, hits from Internet Explorer 7 significantly exceeded hits from Internet Explorer 6 — and that’s with IE6 hitting at least one extra file per visit to work around its problems with PNG transparency.
Finally!
Breakdown of major browsers according to AWStats:
| Usage | Browser | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 62.8% | IE (all) | |
| 34.2% | IE7 | |
| 28.1% | IE6 | |
| 27.2% | Firefox | |
| 4.7% | Safari | |
| 1.8% | Mozilla | (not sure if this is SeaMonkey or some catch-all designation) |
| 1.3% | Opera |
The gap between IE7 and IE6 is solid, nearly 6 percentage points. That’s Safari and Opera combined. And the gap between Firefox and IE6 is closing, with Firefox climbing and IE6 falling. With any luck, it won’t be long before Firefox overtakes IE6 here.
Of course, stats here always seem to skew higher for alternative browsers than global stats. I think it’s because most of the traffic is for a comic fan site. Visitors are probably a bit geekier than average, and therefore more tech savvy than average, and therefore more likely to have installed something other than the default IE.
If you’re still running IE6, and you aren’t required to for policy or compatibility reasons, it’s time to look into a change. The web is moving on. I highly recommend that you either upgrade to IE 7 or switch to an alternative like Firefox or Opera.
