The irrepressible rise of Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was released for download on 18th October and it started to be made available through Windows Update on 1st November. It seems that it is now the second most popular browser version being used.
TheCounter.com offers a web site analysis tool for its clients and produces global aggregated result for free. The browser summary for November shows IE7 with 7% of the users (3rd in rank behind IE6 and Firefox). So far in December it’s moved ahead of Firefox (that is all versions of Firefox) with approximately 12% of market share. Over the same period IE6 was reduced from 76% to 70% - matching the rise in IE7. With approximately 80 million users in November and 17 million so far in December it’s fair to say that it’s a reasonable picture of current ‘normal’ web usage (the corporate market are likely to lag behind this take-up). The percentages and change in rank might not be absolutely accurate, but it is rare for a new browser version to be so prevalent so quickly.
The potential user base can be seen in the statistics for the operating systems being used. In December Windows XP is shown to be used by 83% of the users - all of these people will be offered the opportunity to automatically update to IE7. I wonder how long it will be before IE7 moves ahead of IE6?
If you haven’t check through your website with this version then we’d recommend that you do it as soon as possible. Microsoft have now come into line with how most other browsers understand the HTML and CSS that are used to implement the look & feel of a page. That’s good news from the point of view of web standards, but it may be that your site has been created with the assumption that IE is always a special case and incorrectly thinks it should make the same adjustments for IE7.
[In an earlier posting you'll find details of how you can have both IE6 & IE7 running on your computer using a couple of freebies from Microsoft.]
December 11th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
Thanks for the heads up, Nigel.