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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Woobius traffic specs (quite representative of the enterprise space, so more realistic if you're doing an SaaS that also targets enterprise users/customers), are not too far off, but not 50% yet.

IE: 56% Chrome: 20% Firefox: 16% Safari: 5%

IE versions are broken up as: IE6: 10% (= 5.6% absolute) IE7: 25% (= 14% absolute) IE8: 65% (= 36% absolute)

In other words, dropping IE6 support is not yet plausible. But we've already opted to provide only functional support for IE6 - i.e., things need to work in IE6, and not look totally broken, but they don't have to look great.

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    In other words, dropping IE6 support is not yet plausible.

Why? 5.6% does really justify the costs of supporting IE6?

It all depends on how much work goes into supporting IE6. If the amount of time is substantial, personally I would consider dropping it. But even until the bitter end, that decision depends on your target audience and how much you want that group to be forced to make a choice: upgrade or leave your site.

That's for functionality. I think we're long past the stage where you should care whether or not IE6 gets the same exact _visual_ experience.

For us, it certainly does. Our product's success depends on it working "for everyone". If you invite your structural engineer to the project and they can't use Woobius, you'll revert back to email or some other method, and Woobius will have failed. Therefore, if 5.6% use IE6, given that those 5.6% include some of the largest engineering firms in the UK, we have to support IE6.

I run a business blog that is in the Alexa top 10K for US users. It probably leans slightly more techie than average. Most people read it at work. Here are its stats for the past 30 days:

Firefox 37.78% IE 26.63% Chrome 18.11% Safari 12.24%

OS: Windows 74.55% Mac 16.01% iPhone 2.63% (does not include iPad/iPod) Linux 2.5%

Any way you could break down the specific IE versions?

Sure. Of the 26.63% who used IE, here's the version breakdown:

8.0 72.07% 7.0 20.93% 6.0 6.57%

There was a fraction of a percent using the IE9 beta, and one person using IE 5.5. :)

So it looks like about 1.7% of all traffic to my blog is using IE6, if I did that math right.

20% Chrome is surprising. I would've guessed Firefox's share to be much larger.

I'm not sure, but Woobius might be UK-centric, and Google have been heavily pushing Chrome in TV advertising there.

Wow, Google runs ads on Television? I consume all of my video media from the Internet these days so I guess I just didn't know, but that's surprising to me. Do they run the same type of promotional videos that you find on YouTube about Chrome, or are they totally different adverts?

Here in India, Google has run a full-page print ad recently.

http://www.labnol.org/india/google-chrome-ads-in-indian-news...

I noticed that their print ad drops the http:// from the URL just like the browser itself.

Google ran an ad during the Super Bowl this year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cekQrMEh1wY

That was a very good ad. On top of being well-produced and sweet, it taught people how to use the auto-suggest feature.

You make a good point, I consume all my television via streaming services, too. It's possible that the adverts are different for that compared to broadcast TV. A cursory web search for Chrome TV ads does appear to confirm they're broadcasting them though.

they ran a massive campaign in the parisian subway a couple of months ago

And in the London tube over Christmas. Chrome marketing is pretty awesome.

Yep, we are fairly UK-centric. I should have mentioned that.

and they had a road-side billboard near my house recently. Clearly going after the IE6 demographic :)

The power of cross-promotion + The power of the brand.

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