My mother tried to teach me not to wish things dead, but please IE6, won’t you just die?<\/p>\n
Google announced earlier this year that they will no longer be supporting Internet Explorer<\/a> (IE) 6 in their Google apps. A group of standards-loving prophets got together on 12 February and registered ie6funeral.com<\/a>. On 4 March 2010 they held a memorial service for the venerable browser.<\/p>\n According to the tombstone on the site, IE6 has been in service for nine years to the day and officially expired on 1 March 2010.<\/p>\n Statistics speak differently however, with NetApplications NetMarketshare reporting usage share of 16.97% for IE6 during July and StatCounter 8.11% during August (and 8.79% in July).<\/p>\n In terms of usage share this places IE6 ahead of Chrome, Safari and Opera according to NetMarketshare. At StatCounter Chrome edges ahead of the software relic at 10.64% usage share. The usage share stats for Chrome, Safari and Opera being compared here are across all versions of the browsers.<\/p>\n In South Africa IE6’s usage share is currently at 12.62% according to StatCounter. Locally the browser’s use has declined since July 2008, though newer versions of Microsoft’s browser seem to remain the country’s most popular browsers.<\/p>\n Despite the best efforts of Google and web developers all over the world, it seems that reports of the demise of IE6 are overstated.<\/p>\n IE6, for the love of standards, rage not against the dying of the light.<\/p>\n