The Sample

To perform the analysis I took data from two well know City of London firms. I wanted to assess IE6 usage within the corporate sector. I used Google analytics to complete this analysis. I wanted to see the effect of the Microsoft auto update to IE7 on February 12th was. Admittedly this a very small sample but I know that site visitors come from corporate environments. For this blog around 31% of visitors use IE and of that only 35% use IE6. I know that is not indicative of most of my clients so hence the analysis.

Findings

Firstly Internet Explorer is the dominant browser in the corporate environment. For the three month period IE dominates with around 88% of the market. This was much higher than I had expected.

Secondly Internet Explorer 6 accounts for around half of the visitors. In three months IE6 has dropped from 53% to 49% and this has switched straight to IE7 which has risen from 35% to 39%.

Conclusion

For corporate clients at least it seems that IE6 is going to be with us for a while. For this sample it seems that the forced update of IE7 has had no noticeable effect on browser usage. The 4% shift to IE7 can probably be accounted for from upgrades to Vista. For corporate clients it seems we will need to continue supporting IE6 for a while yet. I wonder what other people’s experience of the results of the forced update are?