Hot off the news that 37signals is removing support for IE6 in their products I thought it would be interesting to look at the stats from WordPress.com as an update to my previous post just under a year ago. Is it reasonable to drop support for IE6 in a mainstream app?

These stats cover Jan 1 – Jun 30: 787 million “absolute unique” visitors, 1.6 billion visits, and 3.3 billion pageviews. I feel these numbers are large enough and WordPress.com-hosted blogs diverse enough to be fairly representative. All the numbers come from Google Analytics. In parentheses I’ve put the delta from the last time I blogged these stats.

1. 59.41% – Internet Explorer (down 3.05%), sub-breakdown:
   1. 53.42% – Version 7.0 (up 18.25%)
   2. 46.28% – Version 6.0 (down 17.82%)
   3. 0.14% – Version 5.5 (down 0.14%)
2. 32.82% – Firefox (up 2.08%)
3. 4.81% – Safari (up 0.98%)
4. 2.04% – Opera (up 0.26%)
5. 0.41% – Mozilla (down 0.11%)

The operating system breakdown:

1. 89.41% – Windows (down 0.95%)
2. 7.86% – Macintosh (up 1.13%)
3. 1.82% – Linux (down 0.37%)
4. 0.17% – iPhone (out of nowhere!)
5. 0.10% – PlayStation Portable (up 0.07%)

So as you can see, IE6 users account for about 27% of all the visits we saw. If I were building something for “the internet” IE6 compatibility would still very much be on my radar. Everyone’s users or customers are different, and if I saw IE6 falling below 10% on one of my sites I’d probably very seriously consider what 37signals is doing.

The good news is most trends are going in the right direction: strong growth of Firefox, IE7, and Macintosh, and the iPhone came out of nowhere to generate 2.6 million visits (and another 1.1 million from the iTouch).

Happy July 4th!