I get that IE 6 is still out there. Fine. Question: What sites are these IE 6 users going to and using? If it is a big corporation that still has IE 6 for security and implementation issues, wouldn’t make sense that those same corporations would be the ones to limit the sites their people can access?
Could we deduce information about the current users of IE 6? Is there a demo profile that we could generate? I’ve seen lots of reasons people may still have it (company policy, old machine, afraid to upgrade, whatever), but what does this do to the way they use the internet? Is their expectation and dependency on the net different than users who have the most modern stuff?
Another question: How do we get a good overall stat on browser version usage? Tech sites are going to draw an audience that has more up to date browsers. A knitting site may not (not sure, you knitters don’t flame me, just comment and let me know). Google has theirs, but do they report the stats (that they used to tell us) on the google search page, or on the gmail page? Yahoo and Google may a lot of users who maybe come there just because they have nothing else to look at, so their users could be skewed the other way.
It’s a fun question to wrestle with if you don’t have a site yet. If you have a site, look at your stats (find out how to get stats) and see, and then make your decision on what to support. The main point: Stats are a pain in the ass, but a lot of fun.