October 5, 2007...9:11 am
Please, Make An Old Web Designer Happy : Update Your Browser
One bane of a web designer’s life is browser testing. We have to ensure that the web sites we build look and work as intended in all web browsers.
We have official standards to adhere to that should make this an easier task, but the people who create web browsers don’t necessarily implement all of these standards or even implement them in the same way. Add to that the fact that there are lots of different versions of the browser out there and things can get complex.
Most web designers were pretty pleased at the end of 2006 when Microsoft launched the latest version of their browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), as it reduced the differences between the major browsers. This should have meant an eventual reduction in the amount time spent testing in different browsers.
Better yet, they announced that they were going to push out the update via Windows Automatic Updates, a routine that runs on the 2nd Tuesday of every month and downloads software that fixes bug on your computer. So users wouldn’t have to choose to upgrade it would just happen automatically.
So the future was looking pretty rosy. It looked like Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), the previous version launched in 2001, would soon be dead and gone and our job would made be a lot easier.
But IE6 hasn’t disappeared. In fact it seems there are still twice as many IE6 users out there as IE7 users.
I’ve been wondering why it is that people don’t upgrade (yes I do spend my time wondering about things like that). All the popular browsers are free, all are easy to install so why haven’t people upgraded. What are the barriers to upgrading. I came to the following completely speculative conclusions:
- People just don’t care. (Why should they? They just want to go on-line and visit a web site.)
- People don’t know about upgrades.
- People think “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
- People have switched off automatic updates.
- Not everyone has broadband so they cancel large downloads.
- Not everyone has control over what they install on their computer (e.g. work computer, public library etc).
- IE7 requires Windows XP and some people will be on older versions of Windows.
Then something struck me. Before updating, IE7 checks to see if you have a valid copy of Windows installed. Could it be that there are so many illegal copies of Windows out there that it scuppered the roll out of this update? Could it be that people aren’t sure whether or not they have a valid copy of Windows so bail out of the process for fear of a knock on the door late at night? I’ve even heard that some legal copies were identified as illegal.
Well we might see a difference in the uptake soon. Microsoft announced today that they no longer require XP users to validate their copy of Windows so this hopefully should remove the fear barrier for everyone.
Please, if you use Internet Explorer and haven’t already done so, please upgrade to IE7. You’ll make a lot of web designers out there very happy.
It’s still going to be available via Automatic Updates, but you can download the latest version from the Microsoft web site right now.
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