Tag: IE7

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The WaSP Buzz recently posted several links to CSS resources, including a rather thorough CSS Reference at SitePoint.

The ISC reminds us that IE7 will be pushed out to WSUS next week, which should help get rid of IE6. Yeah, I’d rather more people switched to Firefox or Opera, but I’m at the point where I’d love to be able to stop worrying about IE6’s shortcomings when trying to build sites. IE7’s shortcomings are much easier to work around. (Sorry to keep harping on this!)

The inventor of Norton Antivirus talks about computer security and has some rather interesting ideas on what policies are worth pursuing…and what policies aren’t. Long passwords? Great for protecting a stand-alone machine, but on a 10,000 machine network, they only need to crack one. Patch everything? Not every vulnerability gets exploited. I’ll have to read the Slashdot thread when I have time; that should be really *ahem* interesting.

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Internet Explorer.I know global statistics still show IE7 only taking up 25%–35% of overall Internet Explorer usage, but stats on this site show a slightly different story (usually skewed toward the crowd more likely to install/upgrade a browser). For the first three days of December, I’m seeing more IE7 users than IE6.

Not by a lot. IE7 has 32.7% and IE6 has 30.3% of the total. And I expect it’ll level out or even reverse as stats from a regular work week filter in. But still, something has finally surpassed that moldering, zombified, shambling heap of a web browser.

Next step: getting Firefox’s numbers (currently 26.8%, also above the global levels) over IE6.

Come on, let’s put a stake in this relic. It’s done.

Update (Thursday): And now Microsoft is finally starting to talk about IE8…even if it is just to say they’ve picked out a name. Whee. 😐

As for the stats, the gap has closed somewhat in the last 2 days, with IE7 at 31.6% and IE6 at 31.2%. This is definitely looking like a home/office split. I’m going to have to write a script sometime to do a daily breakdown of browser versions and see if this actually fits.

Update (Saturday): Yes, IE6 has caught up. 32.2% to 31.1%. *sigh* It turns out I was just seeing a local maximum. 🙁

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Internet Explorer.Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Team reports on a new IE installer release. They’ve changed a couple of defaults, updated their tutorials… and dropped the requirement for Windows Genuine Advantage validation:

Because Microsoft takes its commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously, we’re updating the IE7 installation experience to make it available as broadly as possible to all Windows users. With today’s “Installation and Availability Update,” Internet Explorer 7 installation will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation and will be available to all Windows XP users.

As much as I prefer alternatives like Firefox and Opera, I’ve been frustrated at the relatively slow uptake of IE7. It’s just insane that 6 years after its release, we’re still stuck designing for IE6 as the world’s most-used browser.

So who’s still running IE6?

  1. People running older versions of Windows that can’t run IE7, and who haven’t switched to something else. (This is a pretty small percentage, judging by OS stats.)
  2. People who don’t know how to upgrade to IE7, or why they should.
  3. People who actually want to stay with IE6 (whether for technical reasons or just stubbornness)
  4. People who would be happy to upgrade to IE7, except they can’t/won’t run WGA (on principle, or because it’s broken on their system, or because their OS is pirated).

I don’t know how big each group is, but Microsoft seems to think it’s worth going after #4.

It’ll be interesting to see whether there’s a jump in IE7’s marketshare relative to IE6. Maybe we’ll reach that next milestone sooner than I expected.

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Microsoft is really pushing for people to make sure their websites and apps are compatible with IE7. Apparently this is a real concern for a lot of people who relied on certain proprietary features, bugs, and quirks in IE6. I guess they figured they wouldn’t have to worry about future versions. (Hmm… I wonder where they got that idea?)

The fact of the matter is, I’m not worried. I tested my personal sites and the sites I’d built for work months ago, using the IE7 betas, and more recently with RC1. I made a couple of minor changes to some stylesheets, but that was about it.

Why? I’ve been writing standards-based code for years. I validate it from time to time, and I test to make sure it works in the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari as well as IE. So the code was already portable.

Plus, anything new I’ve built since January has been designed with IE7 in mind from the beginning.

Most of the changes were to workarounds for IE6. Either stopping them from running on IE7 (if the bug was fixed), or keeping them running on IE7 (if it was done using a CSS hack).