In 2011, we reported that many well known sites like Google, YouTube, Hotmail, WordPress, had taken the decision to drop support for the Microsoft’s decade old browser, Internet Explorer 6.
We also dropped IE6 support for our own web app MIDAS in 2010.
But now it looks like major sites are starting to phase out support for Internet Explorer 7 too! …starting this week with Facebook.
Now, if you’re an avid Facebook user, you’ll probably have noticed their new “Timeline” feature. That is, unless you’re using Internet Explorer 7! While other and more recent web browser can now access and use Facebook’s Timeline profile feature, IE7 users are prevented from seeing or using this by Facebook! Instead, IE7 users can only see the old-style profile pages.
It’s likely, therefore, that in the near future, Facebook may drop support for IE7 entirely. You can be sure that other websites will be following suit during the course of 2012.
We here at MIDAS HQ think this will be a good thing!
Since IE7 was released, there have been two major updates (IE8 and IE9). With Internet Explorer 10 being available around the time that the Windows 8 operating system will be launched, we always encourage our users to use the most recent version of their favorite browser available to them. Keeping your browser up-to-date is essential to ensure that you’re protected from the latest security vulnerabilities and so that you can view websites (and web apps, such as MIDAS) as the developer intended! Many modern browser keep themselves up-to-date with minimal user intervention required, and we were encouraged to learn earlier this month that in 2012 Internet Explorer will also begin automatically updating itself!
Although we strongly encourage our users to use IE9, at time of writing, we continue to provide support for MIDAS running under IE7. However, as global IE7 users currently make up just 4% of PC web browser users, according to StatCounter, a number that is ever declining – we are likely to phase out support for MIDAS running in IE7 too before too long!
So if you’re still stuck on Internet Explorer 7… isn’t it about time you updated your browser!?