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 not to release newer browsers on older platforms its potentially Firefox users which will be holding back progress of the Internet. My guess is this is mainly due to Firefox's buggy upgrade code, combined with its absence in previous versions. This may improve over time as Firefox 3.x users (the version without autoupgrade) and others manually upgrade over time, but in the same way XP isn't going to be around forever so the IE users will upgrade as well. Only time will tell.

Interestingly enough Firefox's continual decline is now faster than IE which means it wont be around very much longer:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201010-201109

All I can say is I hope this sends a message out to the Mozilla group who's code quality went through a bad patch [IMHO] that its really not acceptable, even if you give your browser away for free....

[ stats calculated from gs.statscounter.com released this morning
In cases where the browser version is unknown I have given the benefit of the doubt by presuming its up to date ]

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