Are you using Internet Explorer 6 and why?
by December 19th, 2007 Patrick GreerI monitor the statistics for visits to this web site. I can tell what people are searching for, when they come here, what operating system they use and also what browser they use. One thing that really captured my attention is a majority of the site visitors are still using Internet Explorer 6. It’s not just my site however. According to overall web trends on the Internet Explorer 7 page on Wikipedia about 40% of people using Internet Explorer are using version 6. I can understand why most people use Internet Explorer as that’s the default browser that comes with Windows which most people are using but Internet Explorer 7 has been out about a year now and Microsoft has pushed it out with Windows updates so two things concern me. A lot of people are not running Windows Update and installing the latest security patches and they don’t have service pack 2 of Windows XP which Internet Explorer 7 requires.
Of course I would like our clients and their customers to only used the latest official releases of the most popular browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and maybe Opera) I’m even more concerned that a lot of you are vulnerable to security threats and also are missing out on a better web experience.
Are you still running Internet Explorer 6 and anything before WindowsXP service Pack 2? Leave a comment here and tell us why. do you have fears or concerns about upgrades? How can we help? If you can’t upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 for various reasons have you considered the alternatives on Windows like Firefox and Opera?
For the record I’m currently using Firefox 2.0.0.11 followed by Safari on my Mac followed by Internet Explorer 7 in my WindowsXP Service Pack 2 virtual Machine.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:11 am
For what it’s worth, there were a bunch of applications that used the IE engine for rendering (Dave Winer’s OPML Editor, for one), that just broke when you upgraded to IE7. Some intraweb sites had similar issues in that they were tied to IE6. A lot of corporate IT folks actually withheld the IE7 update from the computers they were responsible for until fairly recently, to boot.
Is IE7 actually a critical update now? Last time I checked (a while ago) it was just recommended, so the automatic updates didn’t necessarily pick it up.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:51 am
Thanks for sharing that reason. I remember at one time it was being pushed. If that’s the case it nice to know I’m getting hits from corporate systems. However for the most part I’m thinking of your basic “consumer” visitor. (Not a big fan of the “consumer” term BTW).
I have talked to people recently and they admitted they were afraid to do the security updates. That being said I often check the tech news sources to see if one is causing problems but I’ve seen systems that have not done updates in over a year.