Unintentionally Blank

Phil Nash on the Internet, Web Standards and Accessibility

Internet Explorer 7 Now Available To Everyone

Oct 06, 2007

by Phil Nash

A year ago, Microsoft released the long awaited new version of the world's most popular browser. Internet Explorer 7 swept in to replace the tired, old and fragile IE6. Developers got suitably excited at the prospect of spending less time banging their heads against the brick wall of standards support and bugs in IE6 and some even went as far as thinking about dropping support for IE6. Now we are a year on and IE6 is still the most popular browser, but Microsoft are doing something about it now.

Why Not To Download IE7

Some people were excited about IE7, but I was more skeptical and rightfully so it seems. You see, when you ban a third of your user base from installing your browser's major update, just because they pirated your operating system, you run the risk of the update going unnoticed. And largely it has, IE6 stills rules the roost, Firefox continues to make gains and IE7 is still trying to get a footing on the browser stage.

Time To Move Forward Again

On Thursday, Microsoft announced that computers would no longer have to pass Windows Genuine Advantage checks in order to install IE7. It seems like an attempt to regain market from Firefox and move closer to booting IE6 out of the door. But re-including 200 million users can never be a bad thing.

Get Firefox, But If You Don't Want To, Get IE7

IE7 was an improvement on IE6 especially in terms of web standards support. IE7 offers a better experience for designers, developers and ultimately users (no broken websites to deal with). Now that anyone with Windows XP can get IE7 there could very well be a shift towards upgrading (well, sales of Windows Vista aren't doing the job so a second round of Automatic Updates might do it). I'd like to thank Microsoft for this myself as it can only move the day for dropping support for IE6 closer.

It will be interesting to watch browser stats over the next few months to see if this change does have any effect. Maybe, in another year's time we will be celebrating this decision and dropping IE6 support. Then again, maybe users will continue to be stubborn and use IE6. In the meantime, I will be encouraging people to use Firefox, umm... I mean to use IE7, but only if they are so opposed to change that Firefox is just too far for them.

Unintentionally Blank is Phil Nash's thoughts on web development from 2006-2008. Any code or opinions may be out of date.