Let's track our IE 7 usage stats

No one else is interested? Oh well, I'll continue anyway.

As of October 19, for the month of October:
Msie 7.0 - 3.8 %
Msie 6.0 - 65.6 %

(Firefox 24.5 %)

As of October 31, for the month of October:
Msie 7.0 - 4.2%
Msie 6.0 - 64.9 %

(Firefox 24.8%)

It seems that this site gets more technically savvy visitors than is commonly expected. For today (month of November so far), 800 x 600 isn't even in my top 5 screen resolutions (!)

I talked to someone in the tech group yesterday and she says that they have the update and can run it whenever they want to (I think - some other people are going to a meeting today to find out more.) In any case, it probably won't be soon knowing this institution. I reeeallly hope I don't have to upgrade to vista

So the next question is: how to run v. 6 as a stand-alone???

You can run ie6 standalone: http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/6.0_SP1 Microsoft have stopped producing standalone IE's since that, although there is a hacked-up standalone version of seven available: http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone

It annoys me that these people have to mess around to get IE to work in standalone mode. Why can't MS admit that web designers/developers need to test old versions (that incidentally still have over 60% market share)?

I am interested by those stats, am wondering how difficult it was to wade through our stats program though: it's not very easy to get information on browsers out of it!

Exactly, which is why we need to install a better stats program. We're using Aw stats at work here. It needed some javascript inserted in the template to get it to track screen resolutions. It is open source BTW.

Those browser and screen rez stats are SO helpful though. Maybe you can install that this weekend???

As of today, November 6th for the month of November IE 7 is at 6.3 %! that's almost a 2% increase in less than a week.

Well here's an interesting update. The computer support department at the university I work for is recommending that people not install IE 7 until certain online services are updated to support it. Will this be an ongoing trend? Has anyone else seen examples of this?

I blame this on IE 6 being crap and forcing/enabling people to develop non-standard software which would work in all browsers (including IE 7) if it was developed properly. Grrr.

So I might need to revise my prediction now. When will IE 7 start to replace 6? When people update their online services to work in it. When will that happen? Could be a long time knowing the history of some of these products

ETA: On the other hand, the usage stats on my site report a .5% increase just since last Monday. That's up to 6.8 % overall.

Well, the company I work for has a site which customer can use to make changes to their account and I've had calls where if the customer is using IE7, they are not able to view the site at all...

Yikes! I thought 7 was supposed to be backwards compatible - obviously not!

Yeah, so did I. Oh well, at least it's a good way of getting Opera or Firefox out there

pug-cc.com has 1.53% IE7
ipodx.co.uk has 1.39% IE7
bomb.org.uk has 0.39% IE7

Has MS done the forced security update yet? If not... that's when things will really change.

As far as I know, they have forced the security update. So, maybe people just haven't updated?

I have the forced update on offer, but am not going to download it, is 14mb

Size: 14.8 MB

This free upgrade to Internet Explorer for genuine Windows customers offers improvements such as: enhanced security to help protect you from malicious software and fraudulent websites; a cleaner look, including tabs for browsing multiple pages in one window; features to make everyday tasks such as printing and searching the web easier. This upgrade preserves your current home page, search settings, favorites, and compatible toolbars, and can be uninstalled if you decide to do so.

More information for this update can be found at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=71727

Update: November ended with 7.5% using IE 7. I'm actually a little more concerned about Firefox users - of a total 24% using Firefox, only 6.4% had the latest version (2.0), the others were spread over versions 1.0 - 1.5.0.8. I use Firefox occasionally for testing and yet I don't recall recieving any notification that there was a new version and I should upgrade (that always happens with Opera). This could be an ongoing problem - if Firefox isn't doing enough to notify people of a new version then we could end up with a lot of people using old versions of Firefox for a long time...

My end of november results for IE7:

ipodx.co.uk - 5.19%
pug-cc.com - 7.75%
bomb.org.uk - 1.35%

Update: A week and a half into December and IE 7 is up to 11.6% (up 4% over November) on the site I'm tracking. IE 6 is at 54% which is down 6% from last month. Firefox usage is up 2% to 26%, which means that of the 6% who switched from IE 6, 2% went to Firefox, while the rest went to IE 7. There was also a consolidation of firefox versions, with some users upgrading from older versions.

Time to start doing more routine testing in IE 7.

That last time I posted, about 2 months ago, the numbers looked like this:

IE7 - 11.6%
IE6 - 54%
(IE combined 65.6%)
Firefox - 26%
Opera - 2.2%

Now I've got:

IE7 - 27.3%
IE6 - 40.1%
(IE combined 67.4%)
Firefox - 26.4%
Opera - 3.1%

Opera is up, IE overall is up, and Firefox is about the same! (it was up for a bit too - looks like some Firefox users may hav switched to Opera) Looks like those extra users came from older versions of IE, and Netscape which is down from 1.3% in December to 0.2% today.

So there you go - this audience is generally younger, more affluent and more tech-smart than most, but this shows you that you can expect major variations between sites (i.e. the counter is showing IE 6 at 58% for February)

I would be interested to see what kind of stats others are getting for particular audiences.

Wow... that's very different from the stats I have. As part of my job I maintain a very large and busy website (uses nearly a terabyte of bandwidth a month!). Here are my stats from there:

MSIE (all builds) - 66.2 %

Msie 7.0 - 41.5 %
Msie 6.0 - 24.6 %

FIREFOX (all builds) - 28 %

Firefox 2.0.0.1 - 20.3 %
Firefox 1.5.0.9 - 5.9 %

Others (including safari, opera camino etc) - 5 %

Wow... look at that. Our IE stats are almost reversed!

Wow, that's a great uptake of IE 7 for that site! Is it a primarily UK site or is it more international? The site I maintain is primarily Canadian, and mostly university students.

Also, is anyone else starting to downgrade support for v. 6? I am starting to use some more advanced selectors that don't work in 6 (for non-essential purposes), and I am allowing a few minor display differences as well. Can't be bothered when usage is falling so quickly. So everything looks fine in IE 6, just not as good as it does in other browsers.

I was thinking on my way to lunch that browsers should have to either support something correctly or not at all. Advanced selectors are a good example - extra stuff just doesn't show up in 6 and better browsers get the full display. Much better than faffing around getting it to show up the same way in every browser.

Traffic is mostly UK - probably about 95%!

I totally agree with your view on standards support - but that isn't going to happen unless the W3 stop being so vague in the specs!