So now that Internet Explorer 7 has been pushed to the masses - what are the effects?

I got an interesting email today from Simon Griffin at Etre - a company that “… design, manage, and deliver profitable user experiences”. They run a pretty good blog as well.

I have written about this much in the last few weeks as I disagree with Microsoft’s position of ‘pushing’ out the browser through high priority Automatic Windows Updates. A few weeks before the release Microsoft released some how-to articles and a readiness kit to bring your website up to date for IE7.

This prompted Etre’s study:

“So on Friday 20th October - just two days after IE7 was released - we kicked off a short internal study. We fired up two machines and compared the homepages of all one hundred FTSE 100 companies in both IE6 and IE7. Were these companies ready for IE7? Were their sites bent badly out of shape? Or has this all been a big fuss over nothing? (Y2K bug anybody?)”

The test sample includes the FTSE 100, which is the 100 largest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. One interesting tidbit I enjoyed was the following:

“It’s worth pointing out however that the general lack of adherence to web standards amongst the FTSE 100 companies may have insulated them somewhat from IE7’s various bugs and glitches (IE7 tends to struggle most with standards-compliant sites - particularly those using hacks and filters to achieve decent presentation in IE6). Given that most sites aren’t standards-compliant however, we think our results are pretty representative.”

So what were the results - 13% of the sites broke (whether rendering or layout issues).

“Generalising our findings to the internet as a whole - which is admittedly of dubious meaning and therefore should be taken with a pinch of salt - suggests that there are around 12.7 million websites in need of a little TLC as a result of the introduction of IE7.

(A recent study by Netcraft identified 97,932,447 websites on the internet. And if 13 out of 100 are affected by IE7 - per our findings - that’s 12,731,218 sites that need to be updated).”

You can read their findings through their blog post. After many inquiries they released a FAQ about the details of their study. You can read that here.

I would like to thank Etre for this study as it sheds some light on the potential ripple effects this release can have on the web development community. Do you know of any similar tests out there? I would like to know so I can compare the results.

Also if you are having problems getting your site to work right in IE7, contact Etre for help.

(In case you were wondering GANB looks fine in IE7).

Tags: IE7, Microsoft, Etre, Study, Web Development, Web Design