Compelling Visual Content - Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Update

Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Update

Are you ready for the newest IE 7 (Internet Explorer 7)? 

Internet Explorer 7 (or IE 7 for short) will be a nice advance from where Internet Explorer has been for the past 5 years. Always being worried about cross-browser compatibility, I have been "pre-testing" sites in IE 7 to make sure that they will display correctly in the new browser when it is officially rolled out (And I am really glad they fixed a number of bugs from Beta 1 to Beta 2).

Anyway, apparently Microsoft will be sending out the newest IE 7 via Window's Update. This should help speed along the adoption timeline. The guys over at Boagworld had this to say about it:

The big question every web designer is asking, is how long before they can drop support for IE 6. Well that depends on how fast IE 7 is rolled out. It sounds like this will happen fairly fast because it will be included as part of the windows update. It also looks like it will be a high priority update because of all of the security fixes. In short, Microsoft will be pushing IE7 as hard as possible.

Now, while I'm extremely excited to see the update go out through the "Windows Update" feature, I'm not so sure about the "drop support for IE 6". I'd be glad to finally drop support for IE 5, Mac IE 5, and IE 5.5. However, dropping IE 6 support might come sooner than expected, especially since Microsoft is currently working on the next 2 versions of IE.

Microsoft seem to be more committed to moving Internet Explorer forward than in the past. They are already working on the next two releases and it would seem that we won't have to wait another 5 years for the next upgrade!

The quicker they push IE 7 and possibly IE 8, the sooner we can confidently drop support for IE 5.5 and earlier and the standards compliant the world wide web will become. Our last year browser stats still showed about 1.3% of users using IE 5.0 and 1.8% using IE 5.5. (I think I'll do another "mid-year" look at browser stats to see where we are at now. I'm betting those numbers have come down even more.)

Either way, we are seeing some early adopters who are excited and eager for the new IE 7 rollout. 

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