New year was marked by saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) that has been around since 2001. It’s considered as outdated as IE6 hasn’t been able to properly display the latest Internet technologies for quite some time.
The United States said goodbye to IE 6 in December 2011, after statistics based on Net Applications shown that the number of IE6 users in the country has dropped to less than 1%.
According to the data based on IE6 Countdown Champions that uses Net Application’s numbers, there were 12 countries that had left IE6 behind. Most of these countries are in Europe and The Philippines was the only Asian country that was on that list. They have successfully reduce the number of IE6 users from 2:47% in December 2010 to below 1% in the next year.
We haven’t yet obtained data from Net Applications, let alone those based on geolocation, so we decided to use data collected by StatCounter Global Stats. Apparently, if we refer to data collected by StatCounter GS, Indonesia already said goodbye to IE6 in mid-2011 -since June 2011 to be precise.
IE6 usage figures recorded in June 2011 was below 1% and continued to fall to 0.61% in December 2011. Assuming that Indonesia has 50 million Internet users, it means that there are “only” 300 thousand remaining IE6 users.
Indonesia itself is not an IE-friendly country. While IE8 and IE9 dominates browser usage in some countries, (including the United States), the popularity of IE has long faded in Indonesia. In general, Mozilla Firefox has been the dominant browser in Indonesia reaching 70% share, followed by Google Chrome with 22%. IE8 is the only IE browser that grabbed a share greater than 2%. IE9 doesn’t even show up. [All of detectable Internet Explorer versions combined reached less than 4% share – Ed.]
The decision to ignore IE6 certainly would take away complications when developing websites and web services and maintaining site compatibility for other browsers. The general public had already switched to using browsers that are more sophisticated and have better security features.
Are you one of those people still using IE6 — perhaps forced by company policy?