For example, the last two days at my new job, I have been designing some web pages as per the client’s specifications. The client wanted a certain type of navigation bar, which I implemented using a pure CSS design. It looked great in Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
It looked ugly in Internet Explorer 6. I had to spend over an hour redesigning the navigation bar using a table-inside-table design. Once I did that, I had to spend about another hour doing more workarounds so the design would look good in IE6 and Internet Explorer 7.
I would have been done with the entire site design right now if IE6 and IE7 weren’t used by anyone. Since I had to spend hours working around these browsers’ bugs, I won’t be able to finish things until this afternoon.
I know of four web stat sites who freely give out their numbers on Internet Explorer by version number. Here are the current numbers:
| Site | IE6 usage | IE7 usage |
| Hitslink.com | 19.76% | 13.57% |
| Statcounter.com | 14.04% | 21.21% |
| Statowl.com | 12.75% | 24.47% |
| W3counter.com | 9.79% | 14.40% |
We probably won’t see IE6 numbers go below 2% until 2012; IE7 (which, while buggy, is a lot more pleasant to work with than IE6) will probably linger with numbers higher than 2% until 2015 or so. So, yeah, I will be wasting a lot of time with these ancient browsers and their bugs for a while longer.
Update: I’m not the only one eagerly awaiting IE6’s death. YouTube has just dropped IE6 support and puts up a big “Upgrade your browser” banner visible only in IE6.
