When did the world drop support for IE5.5?
Anything from 10 to 20 percent of all users on the web still use IE6 and the general consensus seems to be that it is too early to drop support for it. But what were the statistics like back when the world dropped support for IE5.5? (or 5.0 for that matter)
My guess is that a significant amount of people were still using IE 5 when sites just stopped working for them and they were forced to upgrade, but a quick search comes up with no dates or statistics.
Either way, with the previous 5 major versions of Internet Explorer and 4 major versions of Netscape Navigator, people upgraded either because a newer version was bundled with their operating system or because sites stopped working. People aren’t upgrading their pirated copies of XP, so what does that leave?
What else changed between then and now? Why were sites allowed to break on older browsers when we all moved to IE6 as the new minimum, but now that we need to move to IE7, it is unacceptable?
A large media company I was working for was fully supporting IE 5.0 in 2005 and IE 5.5 in 2006. They were both under 5% market share when supported.
At the current rate I would expect IE6 to be properly dropped by almost all new sites sometime in 2011.
Certainly doesn't happen quickly.