~22% of China still uses IE6: http://www.ie6countdown.com/

Developing nations have a tendency to not use the latest and greatest. If reaching them is important for you/your product then you have to keep tracking this stuff.

> Developing nations have a tendency to not use the latest and greatest.

Attention developing nations: Chromium and Firefox are completely foss. No excuse, unless you don't have an internet connection.

In which case, what do you need a web browser for?

I'm not sure about this but a lot of software might have been written specifically for IE6 and IE6 only, which might not translate well to Chrome/Firefox, and could cost businesses a lot of money, more money than they deem its worth. There could be ActiveX controls and such which can't be ported to Chrome/Firefox without money.

This is based on my experience at UPS which used a single machine using IE6 and some form of web app to control start up and shut down procedures, or something to that effect. It had no Internet connection, only LAN I believe.

I did ask myself this question too and it does seem peculiar. After some thought, my only guess is the above!

> There could be ActiveX controls and such which can't be ported to Chrome/Firefox without money.

South Korea is a huge example of this. When online banking first came to market, the only way to do it legally in South Korea was through ActiveX controls embedded in Internet Explorer because they had specific encryption requirements in the 1990s versus what IE or other browsers supported natively.

Even as recent as last year [1] it was a big deal in elections, with at least one candidate promising to end the legal requirements and allow banks to enter the modern age of browsers.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2012/11/13/ahn-pledges-to...

Don't they have another browser around for dealing with the rest of the world though? It's not like many modern sites are going to render correctly on IE6 these days...

But all their apps work with IE6, and who cares about people trying to view Facebook while working?

If they are off in their own totally isolated little IE6 only world, I don't get why we care about them then.

Because their workers do go view Facebook. If that's a market you need to target, you need to make it work with IE6.

(There's also the whole "they get infected with everything under the sun and make the rest of us deal with them", but that's not a visual issue.)

And if the internet stops working for them because they use IE6, will they somehow manage to upgrade?

IE10, IE11 in non-standards mode also don't accept trailing commas. I don't care if you accept trailing commas, but dear god, never emit them.

They don't, it's just convenient to make their point. Pretty much any new technology isn't directly compatible with old technology.