Internet Explorer shouldn’t be this popular.
Above are the browser analytics from a Northwestern University student government campaign website I built recently for my friend Neal. NU is home to about 8,000 undergraduate students and the site has received a little over 2,000 unique views (~3,600 visits and 14,000 pageviews) in the past 8 days. That’s roughly a quarter of Northwestern’s apathetic undergraduate campus and a statistically significant sample.
Seth Godin recently posted that using Firefox is like getting into college — I hope that all students in college actually start using Firefox.
I spent only two days building the website — it was a rushed marathon that yielded little sleep and a lot of fun. In the process I decided not to support Internet Explorer 6 assuming that nearly zero college students would still be using the browser. I was wrong. IE6 sent 154 visit to the site or about 4.2% of total traffic. That doesn’t matter much on something this scale, but it tells me that more mainstream projects must still account for the non-standards-compliant browser that lingers on my parent’s computers.