IE7 one year on

Today is the launch of Leopard, Apple's latest version of the OSX operating system. With it comes Safari 3, a product that almost a year on from the launch of Vista highlights the stagnant performance of Internet Explorer 7.

Vista - A brave new world?

When Microsoft launched Vista on 30th November 2006 there was rejoicing amongst the web community at the arrival of a near standards compliant browser in Internet Explorer 7. With the browser shipping with Vista by default and IE7 being pushed to existing users as an update there was a great deal of hope that IE7 would quickly take market share.

Maybe not?

But the operating system has not been as popular as hoped with sites springing up claiming it is rubbish and vendors like Dabs even offering PCs with XP rather than the newer Vista.

IE7 Struggling

As a result of the low impact of Vista, IE7 is struggling to gain market share, hovering around 20%, whilst Firefox is now becoming a major player in the market with 35%.

Vista the Apple way

I'm not a partisan Apple fan but Leopard will be an interesting release to compare to Vista. Like Microsoft Vista, Apple have released a new version of Safari with the new OS. Apple are claiming it to be the fastest rendering browser in the market. That remains to be seen but what is certain is that CSS support is way ahead of IE7. With the forthcoming release of Firefox 3, IE7 is already looking outdated even before it has had a chance to take a foothold.

I would love to see IE7 more widely used - Microsoft is still the dominant OS after all and IE7 offers the chance for a near standards-compliant browser to replace IE6. It is almost a year after the release of Vista now and IE7 market share is stagnating. Safari 3 raises the bar again and Firefox 3 is bound to eat into Microsoft's market share more and more.

What do you think? Why has IE7 adoption been so slow?

Comments

Neil Scott Oct 26 2007

Firstly, I don’t know what sites the w3c used to discover market share stats, but they aren’t representative of what I find in my day job.

For a company site, we have 86% of visitors using IE. Of that 86%, over 80% of them are using IE6.

I get the feeling that the lack of action comes from fearful corporate IT departments who want to make sure they are using the same software as their clients (to test for issues which, as we know are plentiful, in IE6). It doesn’t help that you can’t run 6 and 7 side-by-side easily.

Andrew Oct 26 2007

I think it is a combination of things. As Neil rightly says many IT departments don’t want to upgrade as there are costs involved in terms of existing applications, security testing, and re-training.

On the other hand there are most home users that really just turn on and use. They buy a computer, it works, they are happy. After all, as IE6 was so ubiquitous the bad designers designed only for it, the good designers made sure they compensated for it. Where is the actual drive to upgrade coming from?

And then of course the dodgy versions who haven’t, until the last few weeks, been able to upgrade it.

Perhaps the question shouldn’t be why has adoption been so slow, but rather what incentives have normal everyday people been given to actually upgrade at all?

Don Albrecht Oct 26 2007

I find that IE 7 adoption has stalled at between 25 * 30% for many of the sites I support. Most firefox growth I see in my stats has been at the expense of IE 6 over the past 6 months.

While I find the W3C stats fascinating. We all experience unique stats based on the users of the websites we create and support.

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to when we can put IE 6 out to pasture?

Neil Oct 26 2007

“Anyone want to hazard a guess as to when we can put IE 6 out to pasture?”

My guess is that it’ll be around 2012.

Of course, once the figure using IE6 gets down to about 15%, applications will appear that no longer support it. If they are good, it should accelerate the adoption of other browsers.