Three months ago I wrote a post about “the war” on IE6. We joined in with svenskfast.se and posted a warning to visitors with IE6 that they should upgrade their browser. Another big site who also did this was Aftonbladet, Sweden’s most visited tabloid/news site. I promised I would follow up with some statistics on whether the campaign was successful or not.

These graphs and figures are based solely on the statistics collected for svenskfast.se. Svenskfast use the excellent Omniture SiteCatalyst tool to measure just about everything that visitors do on their site, from browser capabilities and browsing patterns to campaign conversion etc. My colleagues at Iconvert are responsible for this implementation.
The images below have been altered in Paint (oh yeah!) to remove the actual numbers. If you are interested in the actual visitor numbers you can visit KIA Index, this week Svenskfast is ranked as the 21:st most visited site in Sweden.

Statistics for Feb 20 – May 20

We started the campaign on February 20, this graph shows a weekly summary from February 20 – May 20

sf-browser-stats-april-may
You actually notice an increase in IE6 usage in February! It then drops a little after march but unfortunately, we don’t see a huge drop. The numbers fluctuate between weeks but there is no real impact. Here are the actual numbers:

sf-browser-stats-feb-may
An interesting note is that IE8 usage picks up and has a larger user base than Safari in just a few weeks. Unfortunately it looks like most people go from IE7 to IE8, not from IE6 to IE8. Firefox keeps a steady 14% user base, interesting to see if they will loose users to IE8 now that it’s rolled out through Windows Update.

Statistics Oct 20, 2008 – May 20, 2009

To further prove that the campagin had no impact what so ever, here are graphs and numbers from October 20, 2008 – May 20, 2009:

sf-browser-stats-graph-longer
sf-browser-stats-oct-may

These numbers show that the IE6 user base is steadily being reduced. About 1% per month since October and hopefully the decline will continue. Numbers from SiteCatalyst show that about 7% of the visitors use modem connections, those people are certainly hesitant and/or uneducated enough to spend about 20 minutes on  downloading 7+Mb Firefox package. A large number of IE6 users come from companies who are locked into IE6 for various reasons.

Conclusion

I’m sad to say: WE FAILED!

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