Internet Explorer Changeover

Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been a thorn in the side of web developers for many years. If you develop to web standards, Microsoft's IE6 has been the dud note on the piano. If you ignore standards and develop for the dominant browser, the drop in share of IE6 has also been painful. An increasing numbers of users of competing browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror have been complaining about IE-only web designs that do not play well with these browsers. Owners of these sites are putting pressure on in-house IT and outside web developers to encomapss cross-browser design.

Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has been available as a released upgrade in for almost four months. Windows Vista has been available for two months and ships with IE7. IE7 has much better standards compatibility than IE6 so it is of interest to web developers how fast the market transitions from IE6 to IE7. Many developers hope to put IE6 behind them as fast a possible. The key objectives are to simplify development and speed up web development times.

The Wildwood Associates IE Ratio

The only true way to measure the growth of IE7 is to record what is being used to access web servers. Wildwood Associates started tracking the change-over some months ago. By a process of trial and error, we came to the conclusion that the best way to measure the number of IE7 visits and divide it by the number of IE6 visits to develop the "IE Ratio".

Statistics

No one knows precisely how many copies of which browser are in use across the world. Companies like Google and Yahoo have enough insight and information to make a very good statistical guess. They probably also know about major regional or industrial sector variations. However, they are not about to give that information up to the rest of us - at least not unless we pay for it.

If you could gather all of the browser information from every server across the world, you would still not know. Some browsers can be set to declare that they are actually another browser. Bots sometimes do this. The feature has also been built in to Opera and Firefox in order to overcome past practice of programming of websites that assumed you were on IE or Netscape but nothing else. Witness the recent experience with the Walmart video site.

Wildwood Associates IE Ratio overcomes most of these problems. The ratio can be appled to a single web domain, a group of web domains, a geographical area or a market segmant. It is equally valid in all cases because it shows what is happening in the area in which you are interested. Problems of browser faking are also minimized as we are only looking at Microsoft browser changeover.

The IE Ratio starts at something between 0 and 1 as there are more IE6 users than IE7 users. At some point, the browsers reach parity and the ratio will become 1:1. IE7 will then begin to pull away and the numbers will climb.

Latest Numbers

So what has Wildwood Associates been seeing in recent weeks? On the 30th March, we conducted a survey of 121 web domains and the IE Ratio was 0.378. That represents a set of visitors where over a quarter are using IE7.

We will continue to chart this changeover in the coming months. The question for each enterprise and developer is: At what IE Ratio do you stop making allowances for IE6?

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