With the recent release of Internet Explorer 8, I thought I’d add a quick update of the browser usage stats for one of my websites which caters for a slightly more mature audience rather than the younger tech savvy reader.

The most interesting thing I have seen is that usage of IE6 has almost flatlined over the last 6 months and still accounts for 18% of our markets browser usage. This is disappointing as we really can’t be removing our support for it at this level of usage and will have to continue with the code workarounds for some time to come. The release of IE8 has only seen a decrease in the usage of IE7 which still has the majority of the market share at 53%, with IE8 at 4%.

Firefox has a respectable 11% but has not changed significantly since February when we had a sudden 2% increase. Safari at 2.5% has been static since October 2008 now and Chrome seems to have stagnated at 0.76%.

Whilst it is good news that IE8 is taking some of the market share of the slightly dodgy IE7 browser, I would much prefer it to be taking share from the much dodgier IE6 browser. Some of those older XP PC’s must be getting a bit long in the tooth now, but I guess people aren’t changing PC’s quite so much at the moment. Hopefully as the economy improves, and Windows 7 comes out we’ll see more people getting new PC’s and a final decrease in the use of IE6. It’ll be nice to see the back of it frankly.