[thelist] Site Check - IE Explorer v5 anomaly

[Ian Anderson]

Joshua Olson wrote:

> Unless you have some overwhelming and compelling reason to support IE
> on the Mac, I'd suggest you put your energies elsewhere.  IE/Mac is
> an outright shame in regards to compliancy, and has almost zero
> market penetration.  If I had to find a number, I may look at the
> numbers that the BBC published [0] for visitors to their homepage.
> Mac represents only 4.4% of their visitors, and only 30% of those are
> using IE 5.  Overall, that's only 1.32% of their visitors.  I believe
> this to be a fairly representative slice of the general population.

Sorry, Joshua, but to my eye your evidence doesn't support your
conclusion - quite the reverse.

1.32% of the bbc.co.uk audience is a bucketload of users. 1.32% of the
general web audience is a truly staggering number of users.

In my experience, user audiences have to be below 0.5% of any group
to be suitable candidates for the "oh well..." treatment.

In any event, beyond the numbers is the issue of currency. For many Mac
users, IE5.2 is their default browser. Seems strange to me, but it's a
fact. They look surprised when you suggest they could use Safari or
Firefox - and often shrug and say, "och, one day." It also offers some 
unique features that I think some people would miss.

So, personally I consider IE5 Mac to be a browser that is necessary to 
support in the core set of supported browsers, in the same way as IE5 
Windows.

Cheers

Ian

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