What happened to the IE upgrade?
It looks like Microsoft did not proceed with the planned forced upgrade to IE 7 on 12th February as they had previously indicated was scheduled. As yet I have found no explanation for why this didn’t happen. Given that IE 7 is actually a major security patch to IE 6 is ought to have been a “must have” upgrade from day one but for some reason Microsoft do not seem to want to push this anywhere near as much as they ought to be doing.
I have just been comparing the recent browser stats for my site with those from a few months ago and the comparison is quite interesting. The percentage of visitors to my site who use IE 7 has actually fallen from 29% to 26% over the past few months while IE 6 users remains relatively static at 27%. This means that once more there are more IE 6 visitors than IE 7 visitors. It also appears to indicate that people have stopped upgrading from IE 6 to IE 7 and that those who did upgrade to IE 7 have started upgrading again to a better browser than IE. The combined toal for IE visitors is now down to 54% while those using Firefox and Mozilla are now at 41%. Opera and Safari users make up most of the remainder.
Based onn this it soon will not matter whether Microsoft force the upgrade to IE 7 or not as Internet Explorer is fast heading toward becoming a minor browser that (due to its not complying with the standards) may soon find itself being ignored by web developers.
One thing that I am wondering is how many of those who are yet to upgrade from IE 6 have stayed with IE 6 because they need to run badly written web applications that will only work on that browser. Is it possible that over the next year or two that the internet will actually split itself into two parts with one section that only works in IE 6 where these custom applications written many years ago and never updated to work with modern web browsers will be found and the other section making up the majority of web pages that work well in modern browsers but where the pages only provide minimal support for IE 6 compared to the advanced functionality that they support for modern browsers.
Tags: browsers, internet explorer, microsoft, sttandards, web browsers, web developers, written web applications