The is a common claim, but has anyone actually researched this? Is there any evidence that this is still true? It's my understanding that most of the IE6 market share is in Asia, where many people are running pirated versions of XP.
Pirated versions of XP are perfectly capable of running IE7/8.
The problem is that a few years ago Microsoft pushed Windows Genuine Advantage updates automatically via Windows Update (they might even have done this twice), with the result that all those pirated versions of XP turned off Windows Update forever and never installing anything from microsoft.com.
The marginal cost of sending updates to pirated machines is probably negligible, and pirates adapted to WGA within a couple weeks.
So – they managed to convert a few Western users who didn't know they were running a pirated copy. I would place a good bet that the total volume of pirated licenses remained the same, though.
More recent experiments have shown that piracy is really more about customer service than straight up cost [0]. As a result, we have large hordes of unpatched machines that are easy to convert into zombies and running outdated software the rest of us have to support.
>running outdated software the rest of us have to support.
Do we really, though? If the boxes running IE6 are in Asia and elsewhere in the developing world, how many of us really need to develop for them? I can't think of many websites that need to cater to Chinese pirates.
I am from a developing country (Bangladesh) and use a pirated version of Windows (because you cannot buy the genuine one at stores). If I wasn't a web developer I would probably be using Windows XP and IE6 (easier to crack).
I regularly pay for stuff on the internet (domains, hosting, invoicing apps, ios apps, etc. etc.) as long as Paypal is supported (we cannot use credit cards to make international payments).
You need to support as many people as possible with your webapp, you never know who your customer is.
Just because they knowingly or not pirated a copy of Windows does not mean they won't pay for your web app, if at least not in the form of eyeballs for your ads.
That seems like a fair criticism. Those pirated copies of XP will now never be updated again. This will both contribute to the persistence of IE 6 as well as allow security flaws in XP and IE 6 to go unpatched which will increase the potential for these machines to become part of a bot not or spread viruses. At the same time Microsoft's actions didn't prevent any of these pirated copies from continuing to be used, so the overall outcome is a net negative for everyone.
Then they'll get viruses and have to reformat, or call Microsoft support and find out that it's pirated (if they didn't already know) and eventually end up upgrading. If nothing else, the fact that hardware vendors no longer make Windows XP drivers is about to kill off IE 6 once and for all anyway.
Aside from the Windows Genuine Advantage issue, I've been told that a lot of these XP installs have a bunch of social networking stuff hacked in. Simply updating would break them, because they aren't running stock dlls and exes anymore.
I do some limited IT support for a large (140,000 employees), multi-national defense company. Everything is IE6, and IE6-only. If I use IE9 to access our internal apps, it complains I have an unsupported browser.
I know our competition works the same way, as does pretty much the whole government services sector. That's a few million employees in the U.S. alone.
It's great to have a washing machine that works for 10-20 years, but why couldn't the government and corporations pick a _good_ washing machine. Why IE6 instead of some sane browser?
Anyway, there's enough non-IE6 work to do that I generally refuse to write any IE6 code (and when I do, I don't spend more than a minute or two copy-pasting some conditional comment found via Google.)
Why a Motorola Razr instead of an iPhone 4S? Because the latter didn't exist. When IE6 came out more than a decade ago, it was the absolute best browser available. In 2004 when XP SP2 came out, it cleaned up a lot of reliability and security issues. You just have to look at IE6 with a 2001-based lens and realize what the alternatives were at the time.
IE6 was good enough to become the standard for slow-moving corporate types, and they're sticking with it. The every-few-weeks upgrades of Chrome and (now) Firefox are way too fast for them.
A lot of these big companies will stay with IE6 till the bitter end in 2014, when free XP support (security patches) goes away. I wouldn't put it past some of them to pay for XP support rather than switch to another OS, or to negotiate extended XP support into their Microsoft upgrade contracts.
http://www.ie6countdown.com/ has a good breakdown of the percentage of IE6 users around the world. Indeed, China leads the pack in the largest percentage of IE6 users.
I worked for a Mainland Chinese manufacturing company for a while, and they run all their desktops on Windows 2000. They have several applications that targets IE only, and will not run (properly) on other modern browsers such as Firefox or Chrome.
What I have found is that the IT guys in China compile many "recovery disk" with a pirated copy of Windows that people use to reinstall their OS. A lot of these disks are XP-based, but more people are running Window 7 now.
Lastly, several Chinese companies have developed their own version of browsers. I haven't really looked into what kind of rendering engine they run, but they appear to be some kind of rebranded IE. Does anyone have the scoop on this?
I think there's a very strong "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude in China, and most of the people I've met here don't consider IE 6 to be broke, so they see no reason to fix it. After all, every mainland Chinese website still supports it (circular, I know) ...
Still, new consumer machines often have Windows 7 installed, from what I've seen, so things are moving forward. I don't have any numbers though.
Maxthon is quite popular. They use Internet Explorer's Trident engine, newer versions also ship with Webkit and switch engines based on the site being rendered.
I've seen first hand that even a large "fortune top 10 places to work" silicon-valley company forces IE6 on their staff. You don't have to look very far.
I did see Chrome installed as well so that might be their solution :)
IE 6 holds a 1% market share in the US. How many corporations in the US are mandating IE 6 if it's only got a 1% market share?
You'll also note that IE 6 has a nearly 28% market share in China. Now, this doesn't say that these are pirated installs, but they are obviously XP or older, and this is clearly where the bulk of IE 6 market share is.
Keep in mind where browser usage statistics come from, in this case, NetApplications. If your not visiting some chosen list of sites you are not counted. Thus IE6 installs used mostly internally or stats from sites that don't really support IE 6 won't end up getting counted properly.
On the other hand, if you're developing a website for the general public, you probably don't care much about people who only use IE6 for internal sites either.
If you rarely or never go on the actual internet, the fact that you're using an old browser doesn't matter any more than if you're using an old native program to do the same things.
Of course, there is still the issue of people who do go on the internet but don't visit any of the sites that actually track these statistics; however, I don't know how much of an issue this is because I don't know which sites do the tracking.
