Comments on: Who Cares About Chrome. Internet Explorer 6 Has 25% Market Share

By: Sumeet

Sumeet — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Finally I found a different and practical point of view to chrome.

I dont have stats about how much time gets wasted to make web 2.0 apps compliant to IE 6 but I can share what we went through.
Kreeo is one of the platforms that is 100% Ajax (page never reloads). We spent 40-50% of our total development time till date, debugging and making it IE 6 compliant (we created our own ajax framework),
Today 90% of bugs we are facing are still IE6 specific. Our target segment is working professionals and most organizations haven’t upgraded to even IE7. We hope IE 6 install base becomes 0 ASAP and that’s why we promote FF 3 :)

By: antje wilsch

antje wilsch — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

our site is in the 35-60 year old market and ours is even slightly more than 25% still using IE6 (we even have some netscape users – go figure).

Ironically, another project I work in a table-less site (purely css driven) works better in IE6 than IE7.

This is a huge drain of resources on start-ups. I suppose it’s job security for some but I too look at this with my heart sighing thinking “not another browser we have to support….”

By: Imran Hussain

Imran Hussain — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Phew! At least someone isn’t blindly praising Chrome (hint: Michael Arrington ) as if it’s the solution to the world’s problems. There is no way Chrome is going to beat any browser yet. If it can, it will beat only Opera or Safari. No way is this newbie going to hurt Internet Explorer or even Firefox. Plus, we haven’t seen Google Talk or Gmail hurting it’s competitors so far.
And also agree with this point:
“The bottom line is Microsoft has been fighting the browser wars with spitballs and plastic knives and they are still beating Firefox handily.”
Even with all the issues of IE, it still rules the market. So, I don’t see Chrome as a threat to IE at all. Or even the Windows OS, as some have been putting it as.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The 25% number is simple. Corporations.

IT departments are loathe to change browsers, worried it will break all the custom software they’ve built on top of IE6. Microsoft can’t do anything about this, so please stop blaming them.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are still quite a few things (mostly JavaScript quirks) that work in IE6 and IE7, but don’t work in Safari, FireFox, Chrome.

Whether these things are W3C standards or Microsoft bastardizations of legitimate JavaScript, if you want to steal away the 75% market share, you have to make a browser that won’t break existing code.