Island Web Works

Microsoft have steadily been losing browser market shares ever since Mozilla introduced its Firefox browser, dropping from an impressive 91% in 2004 to a humbling 56% in January 2011. Microsoft’s release of IE7 in 2006 and IE8 in 2009 didn’t do much to stop this decline, especially with Google Chrome entering the arena in 2008, but with their latest browser Internet Explorer 9 they hope to turn the trend. So what can we expect from this new browser?

Pin a web site to the taskbar to access a jump list of links to key areas of the site.

Well, with version 9 IE is much more compliant with web standards (95/100 in Acid3, up from 21/100 for IE8), which means web designers hopefully won’t need to implement IE specific code to get their web sites to display correctly in IE9. It also supports the latest versions of style sheet and markup languages (CSS3 and HTML5), so it should be fairly future proof. In addition, IE9 is much quicker to render web pages and it sports a new font rendering engine which makes text appear nice and smooth. The user interface has also been overhauled, with a slimmer and more streamlined appearance and some nice new features like pinning sites to your taskbar for additional functionality (Windows 7 only).

This all sound good, and most IE users will probably upgrade, especially as it will be part of Windows Updates later this month. However, a problem arises for users of IE6. Since IE9 is only available for Windows Vista/7, and all IE6 users are on Windows XP or older, they are stuck and can’t upgrade. This is particularly annoying since Microsoft have launched their ‘The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown’-campaign urging people to move away from IE6 and upgrade, but the only version on offer is the already 3 year old IE8.

Education - not dictation

We at Island Web Works are all for putting an end to the usage of IE6, but we won’t be putting Microsoft’s ‘Upgrade your browser now’-banners on any of the sites we produce. Getting IE6 users to upgrade to IE8 is not a solution, as they would still be stuck with an obsolete browser. Instead, we would rather educate people about the benefits of upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7, something that is already happening in the private sector as people replace old PCs with new ones.

In the corporate sector however the situation is slightly different. Apart from the cost of upgrading multiple workstations, there might be legacy applications in use that only work in Windows XP/IE6. Luckily there is a solution available. Windows 7’s XP-mode allows you to run legacy software in a pre-installed virtual PC application, which comes complete with a licensed version of Windows XP. This makes running legacy applications a doddle, and should allow businesses to take the plunge and upgrade to Windows 7/IE9.

XP mode - old and new in perfect harmony

So, the signs for the IE9 are encouraging, and with more than 40 million downloads so far it has stopped the downwards trend of IE. It is still early days, but Microsoft seem to have created a modern and solid browser, which hopefully will replace the older IE versions as soon as possible and allow the web to become standardised.

Andreas Web Site Development Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 9

The internet is a great medium for users to be able to access choices in just about anything they can think of. One of these choices is the application used to browse the web, the web browser. There have been battles in this area for years, often resulting in court action and sometimes in the demise of the product. Just like you “know” your detergent is better than all the others, you also know your chosen web browser is the most secure, fast and friendly browser available.

There are a number of web browsers available at the moment, such as the incumbent market leader Microsoft Internet Explorer and the “new kid on the block”, Google Chrome. Other browsers exist, each targeting specific features such as speed, platform (mobile phones, etc.) or privacy. The chart below from MarketShare illustrates the performance of each browser in the last 2 years or so. (Download the PDF)

Browser version market share since July 2008 (click to zoom)

As various versions of the web browsers are released and market-affecting court action is announced, it is clear how browser share is affected, particularly with the decline of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 and 7 (towards version 8 ) and the increase in adoption of alternative browsers. The recent European Court ruling that users should be given a choice has resulted in Windows 7 users being presented with a browser election screen will be more forceful in that choice, giving users who wouldn’t otherwise be aware of alternatives the opportunity to move away from the “operating system browser”, Internet Explorer.

This choice is good for the user, but presents us with challenges. We need to embrace the latest technologies such as those offered by HTML5, but this needs to be tempered by implementation of those technologies by browsers and ability for older browsers to be able to provide an equivalent experience for users. A challenge any web developer [should] have is being able to facilitate users of Internet Explorer 6 (”IE6″). IE6 has been around for years. Shipped as part of Microsoft Windows XP, it is “stuck” in that users of Windows 2000 who upgraded to IE6 cannot upgrade to IE7 and corporate/enterprise users can’t perform upgrades themselves and as such are restricted to whatever the IT department dictate. Therefore, there will be a “hardcore” contingent of IE6 users for years to come yet, particularly as official support for Windows XP (and therefore IE6) only ends in July. These users need to be catered for, regardless of your market persuasion.

This morning, Scott Hanselman drew attention to a CNN article claiming that Internet Explorer 6 was about to die for good, having decreased to 4.7% of browser market share in the US. This seemed to be very optimistic, based on the figures we have seen.  Our understanding, provided by MarketShare and being a global metric, is that IE6 continues to retain 17.13% of the browser market share. (Which also illustrates the disparities in statistics collection) So while its death is surely coming, it’s too early to arrange the wake and we will continue to support IE6 in the meantime for the sites we develop.

Nathan Web Site Development Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 6, MarketShare, Scott Hanselman, Windows 2000, Windows 7, Windows XP

As Charles alluded to in his last post, MIGTurbo 2.0 is coming on apace, with no lack of focus on maintaining its high levels of usability. We’ve been thrashing a number of ideas around in various forms to try and come up with a system for Securing data with the flexibility required by regulatory and legislative requirements but without losing usability and comprehension. We hope to post more on how this is going in the next few days, including some of the first screenshots from our new product.

The “other” big product announcement you may have heard about is the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) of Windows 7 by Microsoft. Windows 7 is what many see as what Vista should have been and has been widely accepted and praised as being an outstanding improvement not only on Windows XP, but also Windows Vista. Microsoft really seem to have pulled it out of the bag this time, with one user claiming to have installed it on a 266MHz Pentium II with 96Mb of RAM. If you’re already using Windows 7 in its Release Candidate or if you’re lucky enough to have a copy of the RTM, try these Keyboard Shortcuts which really open up usability when working with windows on your desktop. Some of them will also work in Vista. Try them out, you’ll be surprised what you didn’t know. Our favourite? Windows+Shift+Left/Right to move windows between monitors.

Staying with Microsoft, there’s been a widely publicised outpouring of grief resentment over the continued use of their old Internet Explorer 6 browser. Twitter and various other sources have mounted a number of campaigns to try and encourage users to ditch the IE6 browser in favour of more modern versions such as IE 7 or 8. IE 6 has been the bane of web developer’s lives, with its quirky rendering mechanism and requirements for bad practices in order to force web pages to work as the designer intended. We’d all like to see it pass on, but reality will see that there are many reasons why the browser will hang around for a few more years yet, not least of which is Microsoft’s commitment to support the operating system it shipped with till 2014. Persuading users who are visiting YouTube, Orkut or other sites which are now actively eschewing the IE6 browser is one thing, but persuading corporate IT departments to move away from IE6 is quite another. Coupled with the requirements of IE7 being Windows XP or later, existing Windows 2000 users don’t even have the choice. As such, IE6 continues to represent a sizeable chunk of browser traffic.

In the office, the debate continues about the benefits or otherwise of Office 2007’s new ribbon interface, an interface that has been extended to the rest of the Office suite of products in the 2010 Technical Preview. The detractors have a very valid point in that it significantly reduces usability for users who just want to “get the job done” as they have been trained. My own discussions on Twitter this week highlighted the other side of the argument, which is that maintaining legacy user-interfaces is detrimental to innovation.

Twitter conversation with @alexdegroot

It would be nice to achieve a happy medium, much like the Lotus 1-2-3 emulation mode previously in Excel to try and entice old-school Lotus 1-2-3 users over to the product. I guess when it comes to migrating users who have already “bought in” to your product it becomes a less viable feature proposition. Two of the guys on the Office development team at Microsoft have built a site dedicated to soliciting user feedback, cunningly titled “Make Office Better“. As most users in businesses spend most of their time in Microsoft Office, it’s perhaps an opportunity to drive the future of the product from the “grass-roots”. (It’s also got a great logo.)

Nathan Friday Feeling Internet Explorer 6, MIGTurbo 2.0, Office 2007, Office 2010, Windows 7