That was a saying later in the game and among techies. Website usage stats indicate that in 2007 a solid 67% of people were using IE, and that didn't drop below a majority of usage until mid-2010.
I remember hearing stats about the continued high numbers for IE, but a lot of those numbers were attributed to pirated copies of XP being used in China. Maybe it was why IE6 seemed to hang around as high as it was. Just a clarification of the numbers that I found interesting.
A quarter of Chinese web surfers were using Internet Explorer 6 twelve years after it was released. At that time, most online banking in China only supported Internet Explorer and derivatives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers