WebCEO Releases Report on IE7 Usage

WebKnowHow
Friday, October 27, 2006; 03:16 AM

The WebCEO team is offering a report that shows how usage of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 has changed over time. The data are provided by HitLens, a traffic analysis service by WebCEO [http://www.web-ceo-traffic-analyzer.com].

The report is based on analysis of statistics for over 50 million visitors to more than 265,000 websites from January through September 2006.

"Every browser and even browser versions are different to some extent in the way they read the HTML-code of a web page and execute scripts. The HitLens report on browser usage provides answers to very important questions webmasters are asking, such as 'Do I really need to create a website that satisfies the specifics for every browser?' The information in the WebCEO report can be used to narrow down the number of browsers and versions to support. It will help you to create a really visitor-friendly website and avoid the high expenses of unnecessary code programming and costly web design," says Serge Bondar, a WebCEO analyst.

The IEBlog mentions that Internet Explorer 7 will soon be available via Automatic Updates. The new version of IE is rapidly gaining popularity and a larger market share. The analysis performed by WebCEO shows that the number of visitors using Internet Explorer 7 has grown about a hundred fold from January (when the beta-preview of Internet Explorer 7 was offered) through September of this year. The number of visitors using IE 7.0 grew – from 0.03% in January to 2.27% in September (‘Visitors with IE7’ to ‘All visitors’ ratio).

Checking whether a site is compatible with the newest version of the most popular browser is an obvious task. Problems may arise because some websites don’t recognize the user agent string for Internet Explorer 7 or have layout problems due to changes in CSS processing (the IE Team have removed many known CSS processing bugs in IE 6 and earlier versions. In addition, IE 7 supports CSS 2.1). These innovations are explained by Microsoft’s desire to move closer to the standards provided by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and to offer enhanced security to their users.

Webmasters need to know that websites with non-standard URLs are unlikely to open in Internet Explorer 7. To ensure that all URLs are understood correctly by IE 7 and other browsers and can be easily followed by visitors, webmasters must use standard URLs.

A standardized approach to graphics support is applied in Internet Explorer 7 (for example, the non-standard Dynsrc attribute to the tag is no longer supported in IE 7.0). Testing of graphic objects with the new browser version is highly recommended.

The changes by Microsoft may cause some inconvenience to webmasters and force them to check the compatibility of their websites with Internet Explorer 7. But one should not forget that these changes will benefit all parties. Website visitors will have better security, improved privacy protection and advanced functionality. Webmasters also will need to worry less about the compatibility of their sites with different browsers.