IE7 will make life hard for IE6 users
This sequence of events ends up with the release of IE7 being a bit of a train wreck for many users. I'm not totally sure about the logic behind this sequence of events. What do you think?
First the facts:
- The renderers in IE5.5 and IE6 are broadly similar, some CSS bugs fixed, but nothing compared to the IE7 changes.
- Very few people use IE5 any more.
- Many web developers have got lazy and are in the habit of just testing with IE6 and ignoring IE5.5.
- For the more conscientious, there is a trick to allow IE6 and IE5.5 to run on the same PC.
- The .local trick doesn't appear to be working with IE7.
- Web developers with bad habits from the IE6 world and those that don't have VMWare (less excuse now!), are likely just test with IE7 and ignore IE6.
- IE7 breaks CSS hacks and makes big changes to the way the renderer works, so IE6 and IE7 have very different rendering engines.
- New web pages that have only been tested in IE7 will probably look very bad in IE6, and there could well be a lot of them.
- The uptake of IE7 will be fast for people with XP (Windows update) and slow for everyone else.
Net result: IE6 users get a web experience that gets worse over time. They blame IE and move to Firefox.
I think it would be wise for Microsoft to admit to the .local trick and make it work properly. We need a way to run multiple copies of IE without running multiple OSs.
I don't buy the "but IE is part of the OS" argument. Whatever the technicalities are - we need a way to run IE6 and IE7 side-by-side, and there are some pointers as to how to do it. Lets make it work properly.
Personally I think it's likely that IE7 will severely curtail the market-share haemorrhaging that IE is now suffering, and the browsers will sit about 85/15 or whatever for quite a while.
But anything above 10% is good enough for me. Double figures means that most websites won't be able to ignore Firefox and will be forced into the standards compliance route, and so long as we get that, the battle to force everyone down the proprietory route is for Microsoft.