It has been a while since Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7. They even made it part of a Critical Update on Windows Update. However, 37.3% of Sampa site owners are still using IE 6. This month we just crossed the line where we have more site owners running IE 7 than IE 6, but still IE 6 should be into the single digit market share by now and it's not!
This annoys us mostly because there quite a bit of backward code that we have to write just to make sure things work on IE6. The two biggest issues are the many bugs around the "boxing model" and "positioning" and the lack of support for PNG Alpha channels.
However, last week we started a more aggressive strategy to get our users out of IE6. First of all, every time a new user signs up to Sampa, if they were using IE6 during the sign up process they'll get an extra email message telling them about IE6 and suggesting they should upgrade to IE7. The second thing is when they sign in to edit their website, they'll receive a message telling them they are running an older browser (they can dismiss that message forever).
We hope to see a significant drop of IE6 users over the next few weeks or so.
I wish other Web 2.0 startups would be doing something similar. All of us can only benefit by accelerating the migration to IE 7 (and FF2) and hopefully can completely drop support for IE6 in a year or so.
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
