Global Moxie

A little over a week ago, the Internet Explorer team announced that Internet Explorer 7 had rounded its 100 millionth installation (100 million!). Not a shabby milestone for software whose final version was released only a few weeks ago:

As of this week, over 25% of all visitors to websites in the US were using IE7, making IE7 the second most used browser after IE6. We expect these numbers to continue to rise as we complete our final localized versions, scale up AU distribution, and with the consumer availability of Windows Vista on January 30, 2007.

According to Information Week, this rapid growth comes almost entirely at the expense of Internet Explorer 6. Firefox and Safari continue to hang tough, while IE6 and IE5 retreat fast.

That’s great news for web developers because IE7 has managed to expunge loads of browser bugs. Many glitches still remain, but it’s a vast improvement over IE6. And assuming that IE7 continues its rapid growth, the tears we’ve shed over the crummy IE6 browser may soon be behind us. We can spend more time designing and less time chasing bugs.

According to the Net Applications report for December 2006 (which lags the IE team’s January report), the top-ten lineup shapes up like this:

1. Internet Explorer 6.0: 60.66%
2. Internet Explorer 7.0: 18.26%
3. Firefox 1.5: 7.49%
4. Firefox 2.0: 5.20%
5. Safari 41: 3.31%
6. Firefox 1.0: 1.26%
7. Safari 31: 0.81%
8. Opera 9.x: 0.68%
9. Internet Explorer 5.0: 0.41%
10. Netscape 7.0: 0.39%

For me, that means that I’ll be checking my designs pretty much exclusively in these browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6 and 7
• Firefox 1.5 and 2
• Safari

No more development for the oh-so-buggy Internet Explorer 5.x browsers, and I’m looking forward to the day when I can stop fretting about Internet Explorer 6, too. Whether you make this same call for yourself now or in a few months, the good news is that the bad old browsers are slowly fading away.

Meantime, of course, you may need to update your sites’ markup to make sure everything works properly in IE7. Lazy slob that I am, I waited til the public release of IE7 before I checked my own site and software in the new browser. Yep, after months of Microsoft offering beta versions to avoid just this situation, I was caught with my pants down on a pair of issues:

1. Big Medium’s CSS dropdown menus refused to work. They use the Son of Suckerfish technique, but happily there’s a simple IE7 fix which has since been added to Big Medium.

2. This site’s homepage was screwed up because of a CSS hack I’d used to work around IE6’s missing support for min-height. The fix was to drop the hack in favor of conditional comments that target IE6 or earlier:

   <style type=”text/css” title=”text/css”>
       div.minHeight {
           min-height: 100px;  /* doesn’t work in IE6 */
       }
   </style>
   
   
   <!--[if lt IE 7]>
       <style type=”text/css” title=”text/css”>
           div.minHeight {
               height: 170px;  /* IE6 treats this like min-height */
           }
       </style>
   <![endif]-->
   

Oh what a fan I am of Internet Explorer’s conditional comments. They let you target any version of Internet Explorer to pull in browser-specific style sheets and JavaScript libraries. Not familiar with them? Read up. They’re so much healthier than CSS hacks.

And friends, that’s the good news about the new era of IE7: Fewer hacks, more design.