Depending on who you ask, IE’s market share hovers either just above or just below 50%. While other browsers have made inroads, it’s still the big dog on the block. If you look at IE6, however, there are good arguments that we shouldn’t be counting them when calculate percentage share.
- CTO’s force IE6 as a standard to prevent employees from using the latest and greatest sites. Whether that means that company policy discourages conducting private business at work or preventing AJAX security exploits, these are likely not your best customers.
- IE6 usage peaks during business hours and falls off dramatically outside of that. This supports the hypotheses that visitors are using IE6 for work and using a more modern browser for personal activities.
- Visitors with IE6 tend to be technologically backward and have somewhat lower conversion rates than those with newer browsers.
If we discount IE6 users and just focus on those with newish to newer browsers, we get a somewhat different picture. Taking the Net Apps browser market share stats for December 2010, the raw market share for IE is 57.08%. Subtracting and adjusting for removal of the 13.06% share for IE6, the market share for IE is now 50.63%. And that’s for the most optimistic of all of the market share reports. With some of the other reports, fully 60% of all visitors don’t use IE.
So, while the argument for not focusing exclusively on IE was already strong, this makes it stronger. Given the downward trend with IE, and the upward trend with mobile browsers, focusing your precious resources on mobile makes a lot of sense.
