IE6 has left the Iceland

…for most parts at least.
One of the brilliant perks of living in a small community is how easy it is to reach out and get valuable feedback from the crowd.

I’m working on a pretty important website and was wondering if it is timely to introduce some CSS3 and fancy fonts. A simple question on twitter turned into a very interesting stats session where many webmasters and tech boffins shared their browser stats. These are numbers from many of the most popular sites in Iceland.

Ingi Gauti stepped up and offered the stats from barnaland.is Icelandic equivalent of Craigslist come Mothers united.

Ingi also shared this brilliant screenshot where he politely points out to IE6 users that their browser is an 8 year old piece of crap.

Hugi followed suit and published data from the government road traffic directorate.

Hannes from TM Software offered stats from a “popular” Icelandic site. They run many of the main screen realestate in Iceland so it’s anyones guess which site he’s referring to.

Siggi Árni joined in with data from Landsbankinn.is one of the main banks in Iceland.

… and finally Rósa Stef gave us insight into two of her sites

All of this gathered on Twitter within a couple of hours.

Scientific summary concludes that we’re hovering around 1% IE6 usage in Iceland except that odd site from Rósa.

So I’m putting a nail in the coffin and stop testing this browser specifically. Of course everything will degrade gracefully and all that jazz, but I’m not wasting any more time on making things pixel perfect for this ancient fiend.

  • http://fannar.me/ Fannar Freyr

    For Bílauppboð (http://bilauppbod.is) @ 7/27 – 8/26

    Out of 79,694 visits:

    IE 51.02%
    - IE8 73.84%
    - IE7 23.61%
    - IE6 2.52%
    - IE5 10 visits :)
    FF 33%
    Chrome 8.29%
    Safari 6.34%

  • Axelthor
    • http://www.gommit.com gommit

      Quite.
      Found this as well when I wanted to compare the numbers above to the global average.
      IE6 is below 1% there but these stats are probably from sites outside Iceland. My guess is that IE6 users stick to local sites ;)

  • http://twitter.com/rosastef Rosastef

    I don’t kow if it makes a difference but the 5% comes from Yahoo Analytics. It’s a typical “Icelandic company” site and these stats have amazed me the entire time I’ve been maintaining this website.

    I would also like to point out this blog post I wrote in Icelandic last February about IE6, urging people to upgrade or change to other browsers – http://rosastef.midjan.is/2010/02/17/explorer-eda-firefox-hvort-er-betra/

    • http://www.gommit.com gommit

      Hugi is also hesitant to own up to the Google Analytics accuracy.
      Can we trust our tracking tools?

      • http://twitter.com/atlipall Atli Hafsteinsson

        I was talking to Hugi the other day to try to figure out why the Google Chrome is so popular on us.is .. he found this: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=3e5b55c4a4ab8f96&hl=en .. there is a “feature” in IE that discards all cookies for two letter domains like us.is. This feature has costed us lots of time and what hair I had left on my head.
        Applied the fix suggested yesterday and the numbers are allot more convincing now.

  • http://www.facebook.com/gyda85 Gyða Bjarkadóttir

    Bíddu fórstu ekki á jarðaförina? http://ie6funeral.com/ :)

    • http://www.gommit.com gommit

      Jú mætti seint en kvaddi með stæl

  • http://twitter.com/gummisig gummisig

    All we need to do now is get rid of IE7 and preferably IE8, but were getting there