It really depends on the domain. That two percent can be the difference between wildly profitable and failing.

After all, Google still happily sells clicks to IE 6 users. If you're business relies on external ads and optimizing conversion rates, IE 6 remains a priority.

I seriously doubt IE6 support can be the difference between "wildly profitable and failing" for any business. Can you name one example of a failing company that started supporting IE6 and then became wildly profitable?

Maybe not in 2011. But a couple years ago, it wasn't unusual to see 50% IE6 traffic on corporate-oriented apps.

And, yes, I can give a few examples were the webdevs ignored legacy browser support and got burned.

I'm genuinely curious to hear which web developers ignored legacy browser support and got burned. Please divulge.

Sure. The example I was thinking of in particular was an internal project from about 5 years ago where their CSS2 layout completely blew up on IE6. However rather than get down-n-dirty to fix it, they demanded additional budget for a rewrite using tables.

But just last week, another subcontractor apparently didn't realize that our government client was stuck on Flash v9 and spent the next two weeks trying to sort it out.

And it hasn't happened in a few months, but we used to get occasional complaints from clients stuck on Safari v4.

Obviously it would be the other way around, discontinuing IE6 support might lead to falling. Think of random niche industries with ancient old hardware and no-one who cares about software updates.

Fair enough, but I still don't think a business that is wildly successful would fail by discontinuing IE6 support -- even in a "random niche industry" where IE6 users make up more than 2% of their customer base. In fact, I doubt any of those businesses are currently wild successes. But I guess that all depends on how you define success.

Google dropped IE6 support for YouTube over a year ago. They are dropping Google Apps support for IE7 on Aug 1st (that's today for some people reading this).

For search results it's probably more worthwhile and not as hard to support the IE's but for their other apps they say they are only supporting that two most recent browsers.

Google Search dropped mainstream support for IE6 last fall. IE6 users are served a degraded experience that is roughly on-par feature-wise with Google Search as it existed in May 2010, and new features are no longer rolled out to IE6.

I just couldn't help but think how cool would it be if they slowly added spiderwebs and dust to the pages that are served to IE6 users.

And this is how IE6 will slowly be deprecated across the industry. Sure it's easy for an intern to get up on his soapbox and proclaim, "We should stop supporting IE6 because that browser came out while I was still in elementary school." But when you look at the how many people still continue to use it, deprecating support is on a case-by-case basis, and it is irresponsible as web developers to just ignore that it even exists.

I would actually argue that Google Search is still supporting IE6, just as a degraded experience. Dropping support all-together means they just ignore it exists, which is far from the truth and likely won't happen for 5+ years.

Well, under that standard, Google Search still supports Netscape 4.7, which is also served a (slightly different from IE6) degraded experience. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it supports Netscape 1.0 and Lynx either.

I'm sure the videos still launch in the Flash plugin in IE6, so not sure how important dropping support is.

In terms of percentage that's pretty small, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. If you estimate the number of US internet users to be ~240 million, 2% is 4.8 million people.

Sure, a small chunk of the pie, but still a large chunk of people. And, in a hypothetical situation where your % of revenue generating visitors is exactly the same as for the overall population, not many companies would want to lose 2% of their revenue, or profit.

If it costs a large enough amount of money, they would. More precisely, they should. Why stop at IE6? There's still a combined large number of users using IE5 and IE5.5 and Lynx and NS4 and Amaya, etc.

In some cases, it may cost quite a large amount to continue to maintain and patch sites to also support IE6, and that money needs to be deducted from the 'profit' had from IE6 users. And more to the point, that same money being spent supporting those IE6 users could be being spent on bolstering mobile device work, newer browsers, assistive technologies, and what not.

The "well, we don't want to lose the profit from our users" has been thrown at me in the past, with the charge that "well, techies just care about gadgets/technology". No... in reality, many of us in the trenches (not all, but many) end up being better positioned to see the real business effects of these decisions. I'd much rather be working for a company that was spending its money wisely and being forward thinking rather than reactionary and wasteful. That's not a tech issue - it's a business issue.

Those browsers are not alike. If you follow standard advice - valid HTML, progressive enhancement, unobstrusive Javascript (or fallbacks where needed) - Lynx will render your snazzy 2011 page with the same fidelity as a 1995 Geocities page, and the result will be perfectly usable. IE6, though, will not only ignore your CSS3 stuff, but also completely misinterpret the things it does "understand".

2% may use IE6, but I'd guess that 2% uses the web WAY less than the other 98%. IE6 is probably 0.5% or less of total page views. As a group, IE6 users are also probably significantly less likely to spend money on the web.

Then there's opportunity cost. Time and budget spent on supporting IE6 could have gone into additional features. It's true that supporting IE6 is a business decision and it could be worth it for some companies, but even that 2% statistic makes IE6 seem a lot more relevant than it really is.

Opera has more market share. However, many sites don't support it. The iPad is already at 1% market share and should easily be at 2% within the next 12 months. It really depends on your target audience, of course, but which group of people would you guess has more extra cash to spend? I would target the iPad audience before the IE6 audience.

Considering so many use IE6 at work and so few at home, 2% of visits != 2% of the population in any meaningful way. So the question is more like: how important is it for my application that users at big corporations with outdated software can still use my app while at work instead of just at home?

The blog post talks about Facebook development. Has Facebook ever released browser share numbers? I bet their target audience is a lot less than 2% IE6.

I was responding to a specific comment which suggested 2% is nothing worth caring about, not to the original blog.

That said, I would think that Facebook is mainstream enough to get it's fair share of non-technical users.

IE6 usage has nothing to do with technical vs non-technical anymore. Most IE6 usage in the US is due to stupid corporate policies, home users long ago moved on, and of course the current widespread mobile browsers are all way past IE6.

I optimistically hypothesize that users are less likely to access Facebook (or most other non-internal webapps) from a locked-down corporate desktop, and even if not, that those users also access Facebook from non-corporate systems, making the loss of access from the corporate system partly illusory -- if the posited loss is "2%", I think the actual loss is probably as low as 1%.

There was story floating around here not too long ago that had IE 6 at around 4%. Incidentally, Safari was around 4%. I know a lot of devs that want to make sure things look great in Safari but don't care about IE 6 at all. Granted the obvious argument is that 4% of Safari users is a large percentage of Mac users, but it just goes to show how deceiving browser share numbers can be.

I'd also posit that while 2% may seem like nothing for a site with a small flow of traffic, it equates to a lot of money for a high volume consumer-oriented site. I run into a lot of this through my affiliation with Mogotest. During our customer development process I was amazed to find that several of the CTOs I sat down with will support any browser with greater than 0.5% share on their site. And these are guys that have definitely done their cost/benefit analysis.

The browser market share does not matter, the _conversion_ share does. I've heard from several large retailers that IE6 comprises a significantly higher share of their online sales than the market share would indicate. That could be because Grandma's PC hasn't been upgrade, but it might also be because people are buying stuff on their lunch hour with their nasty old IT-department-supported XP with IE6.

Sure, perhaps 2% of the US as measured by some collection of large, publically facing websites. Now try taking that measurement again within the walls of a set of large corporations. This becomes particularly relevant if you're developing an internal application for one of those corporations.

If 50% of your customers are among that 2%, IE6 matters.

If you're a social media startup, the customers looking for social media solutions are probably also the folks who are NOT running IE6.

I suspect that a large percentage of that 2% are business users who have an internal app which only works in IE6, and are therefore have to use it.