Could it be Firefox not IE which holds back the Internet?

There's been a lot of complaints about Microsofts policy to not release newer browsers for older platforms, many saying this will hold back the Internet. But what is actually going on? Are there really more people on older versions of IE than other browsers?

If we look at the percentage of users of each browser which are using releases 2 or more out of date we get the following numbers:

% of Firefox users on version 5 or lower: 42.85%
% of IE users on version 7 or lower: 18.34%
% of Chrome users on version 12 or lower: 4.11%

Even if we are generous and include people on FF4 or lower (because FF7 has only recently been released) the story is still the same:

% of Firefox users on version 4 or lower: 37.32%

Even giving Firefox the benefit of the doubt you can see Firefox users are less than half as likely to upgrade from old versions than users of anything else.

This all shows that even though IE have a policy

Posted by Daniel: 11:17, Sat 1st Oct 2011