Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 7

I was digging around in Google Analytics last month and noticed a slightly worrying trend: while IE6 usage has gradually been gradually falling to an almost insignificant amount, the number of visits from IE7 users has been showing hardly any sign of waning over the last year, holding steady at around 6% of all our traffic.

Surprisingly, a very large chunk of the IE7 traffic was coming from devices on the University network, even though most people are running either IE8 or 9. It turned out that this was because there's a setting in IE9 to 'Display intranet sites in Compatibility View' (where Compatibility View makes IE9 behave as if it's IE7), and this was enabled by default for york.ac.uk.

A couple of quick emails to IT Services later, and a change was pushed out to all supported desktops to turn this setting off (unless the user had manually set it).

The change was immediate:

Change in internal IE7 traffic after disabling Compatibility View for intranet sites (the regular dips are weekends)

We're now down from 18% to 6% for our internal IE7 traffic, and overall it's come down a couple of percentage points from 6% to 4%.

Google dropping support for Internet Explorer 7

Yesterday, Google announced their plans to stop supporting older browsers. From 1 August 2011, only the current and previous versions of the main browsers will be guaranteed to work with Google's suite of web applications (which for a lot of people primarily means Google Mail).

For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

With Internet Explorer now up to version 9, this means that they will no longer support version 7 (not too surprising, given that it's nearly 5 years old).

Looking at our own stats for the University of York website, last month we saw IE7 account for 5.7% of our traffic, with ten-year-old IE6 still hanging on in there with 2.7% of our visits.

With Microsoft also behind a campaign to move the world off Internet Explorer 6, things are looking promising for getting people to move over to much more modern browsers.