The Decline of Internet Explorer 6 and the Rise of Internet Explorer 9

As we’ve mentioned previously, one of our main missions here on the IE team at Microsoft is to get people off of IE6 and onto a later version of IE as fast as humanly possible. So, we thought we’d take this month’s new browser market share data to talk about a fact that many may find surprising. In the last six months, IE6 usage is now declining faster among enterprises than it is among worldwide consumers. We believe this reflects how organizations are recognizing the need to migrate to a modern browser. At the same time, the momentum of Internet Explorer 9 Beta continues at a healthy clip, reaching over 15M downloads through November and now equaling 0.38% of share worldwide.

In November 2010, IE6 commercial usage share as tracked by Net Applications reached an all-time low at 10.3%. This is actually significantly lower than all-up IE6 usage share, which dropped to 14.55% in November. At the same time, IE8 commercial share has surged over the past several months to 34.1% - over three times the commercial usage share of IE6. Overall, IE8 usage worldwide grew 0.74% in month of November according to Net Applications, while IE6 worldwide recorded its biggest drop in share in several months – dropping 1.38% share. Much of IE6 usage share remains in China where IE6 represents 45.2% of browser usage – though it does continue to drop there too from 50.5% in August of this year.

As we continued to dig deeper into the data, we were pleased to see that the IE6 usage patterns are consistent regardless of the number of seats in the organization and independent of the host operating system. Small to medium sized organizations lead the pack in moving off of IE6, but even the largest enterprises with over 50,000 seats show similar trends – just 12.1% of web browsing in those organizations comes from IE6. While XP usage contributes to IE6 usage, the vast majority of commercial XP machines have already upgraded to IE7 or IE8. Less than 20% of web browsing on commercial XP machines comes from IE6.

This is the first time we’ve discussed commercial usage share levels and trends from Net Applications. The great news is that more than one data source confirms the rapid pace of IE6 to IE8 upgrades.Independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc. published in May 2010 some of their own IE browser usage share data of client visits to Forrester.com in the report Corporate Desktop Operating System and Browser Trends, Q2 2009 to Q2 2010. In the year immediately after IE8 launch (April 2009 to March 2010), Forrester saw IE6 share cut in half on their website, dropping from 41% to 21.1%, and IE8 share multiply from 3.1% to 17.3%. The rate of IE6 share loss from Forrester and Net Applications are on par: Forrester showed an average of 1.8% loss in IE6 share per month versus 1.5% per month from Net Applications. Forrester showed an average of 1.3% increase in IE8 share per month, compared to 0.9% per month from Net Applications.





The wholesale migration of IE6 to IE8 is encouraging. It reflects on the strong business value that IE8 provides over IE6. It shows that enterprises are upgrading to a current browser platform for their ongoing or future Windows 7 deployments. It means that we have a growing base of enterprises that will eventually be able to migrate to IE9 with relative ease. Most importantly, this progress indicates that many IT organizations have been able to successfully mitigate IE6 application dependencies and chose to move towards the benefits of a modern browser. Perhaps the IE6 compatibility challenges are turning out to be smaller than people expected in many organizations.

If you are part of the 10.3% of enterprises still running IE6, the good news is that we’ve continued to produce guidance to help you build a business case and gain the technical knowledge you need to move off of IE6. Everything from how to tackle app compat issues to solutions for virtualizing IE6 is available on the Internet Explorer TechCenter. We’ve also put together IE8 Migration Workshops for our enterprise customers. (If you are an enterprise customer, you can contact your Microsoft partner or account rep directly for more information.) Finally, you can learn more about how other enterprises, like Dell, City of Miami, and Indiana Office of Technology, migrated from IE6 to IE8.

For those of you who have upgraded your organization to a modern browser – bravo! We’re excited about what IE9 can offer to our business customers. Though while we’re in beta we aren’t recommending IE9 deployment to a production environment just yet, we’re excited about IE9 excitement and IE8 momentum in the commercial space. Stay posted for more commercial updates as we approach the next milestone for IE9.

Thanks,

Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Product Marketing


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