greenideas

The other day, my XP install prompted me to update to IE7. I’m curi­ous about whether this is hap­pen­ing to other Win­dows users out there. Does any­one else have a Win­dows box that’s forc­ing them to make the switch? What about you folks in the big shiny build­ings? Are your cor­po­rate IT over­seers deploy­ing IE7 on your work machines?

At the lum­ber­ing behe­moth of a com­pany where I’m cur­rently doing some con­tract work, all of the machines run IE6, and I can’t imag­ine that the IT group here is going to push an upgrade any time soon. Fur­ther, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that there are scores of com­pa­nies out there, from the very big to the very small, that are sim­i­larly unlikely to upgrade any­time soon.

As you can prob­a­bly guess, the point of these queries & spec­u­la­tions is that I’m really start­ing to won­der if the web devel­op­ment com­mu­nity will ever be able to stop sup­port­ing IE6. Of course the answer has to be “yes, at some point” but when? It’s only been a year since IE7 shipped, and I’m guess­ing that there are still more folks out there using IE6 than IE7. Although I can’t find any num­bers about the IE6 vs IE7 mar­ket share, W3schools has a break­down of their site’s users that shows more peo­ple using IE6 than IE7, and if the web savvy still skew that way, it seems safe to assume that the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion does as well.

I don’t have a good answer for that ques­tion (if you do, I’m all ears), but it’s worth think­ing about. I’m all for push­ing ahead and cre­at­ing new stan­dards (CSS 3? ECMAScript 4? HTML 5? w00t!), but if there’s never going be a widely used browser that’s going to imple­ment them (to say noth­ing of imple­ment­ing them cor­rectly), then isn’t it all just navelgazing?

Of course, as I type this, I can hear one of the for­merly devout IE peo­ple near my cube explain to some­one how the Fire­fox Wed Devel­oper Tool­bar “can really make your life eas­ier.” Maybe there’s hope after all.

Post­script: The Wiki page about the his­tory of IE men­tions a rumor that a pre-alpha IE8 has been cir­cu­lat­ing on P2P net­works. That pretty much has to be false, right? I’m sure the IE team will try their darn­d­est to ship IE8 some­time before 2013, but I’m will­ing to bet they’re more focused on com­ing up with new and dif­fer­ent ways to man­gle web-standards bug-fixes than get­ting another ver­sion out the door.