Digi.no the largest Norwegian IT magazine have just published numbers about their statistics on browser usage for Internet Explorer 6. And their data so far shows that IE6 usage is in a total state of *collapse*...!
In the mid of February the
"war" against IE6 was initiated here in Norway, and it spread rapidly within hours through the entire web thanx to twitter and a lot of dedicated individuals like Anders Brenna, Erlend Schei, Børge "Forteller", myself and many more.
It even went so far that Steve Ballmer had to create a
statement where he gave his official support to the campaign against IE6 (only in Norwegian unfortunately)
Today digi.no posted an article about
the declination of IE6 usage at their website. The article is only in Norwegian, but I'll translate the "rough bits" for you here.
From the mid of February when the campaign started and up til today IE6 usage have declined from 8.3% to 7.0% in digi.no's weblogs. These are *massive* numbers for such a short amount of time, interpolating this IE6 will be completely gone in less then four months from now. On their "sister magazine" (dinside.no) the declination of IE6 usage have been even more drastic. In the same period at dinside.no IE6 usage have declined from 12.8% to 10.6%. And this is within 14 days!
Now another weird fact in digi.no's weblogs is that one should expect most of the users upgrading from IE6 would jump to IE7 or IE8. Especially considering that
IE8 is actually a pretty decent "way out" of the moisty IE6 lock-ins. However that has not happened! In fact the total amount of IE (all versions) usage at digi.no have declined from 41.3% to 37.8%, while mostly all other browsers, and especially Safari usage have drastically increased.
Now it can be dangerous to try to interpretate these numbers because of the fact that Safari came out with a new major release, which often tends to have users "testing" the new browser before returning back to the "old and steady" browser. And also the numbers at dinside.no showed IE usage almost stable through the same period. But I think that I already now can come with a pretty decent advice to Microsoft as an organisation...
The next time you guys create a new and improved browser - IE7 - you seriously need to push it over Windows Update in a much more agressive way then the way you pushed IE7. Another round like this with "spring cleanups" and you're effectively *out* of the browser business. That was the strategically wrongs you did with IE7, and that's the reason why you have lost almost 4% of your browser shares (or *maybe* lost 4%) these last 14 days. It seems you're humans too, and sure your gravity is large, but when the "world revolts" you're still peanuts in regards to relatively amount of gravity and pull ...
But then again, after watching Microsoft's
apologize for slow IE updates at digi.no (also only Norwegian unfortunately) I think they have learned their lessons. Microsoft actually made me believe that from now on it's "standards rules" when it comes to browsers and IE.
Let's all just hope that this insight didn't come too late...
...after all, Microsoft are the ones who "installed a computer in every home" and they will be talked about for centuries to come, no matter how it goes with them in the near future...
...and I would seriously *not* like to see Apple inherit them as the "new King"...!!
.t