There have been warnings galore over the past couple of years (including some from Microsoft themselves) of how badly websites are likely to cope when viewed in IE7. This being because it’s more standards compliant than previous versions, and also because Microsoft have said they have not designed IE7 to be particularly backwards compatible with quirks and non-standards compliant features of earlier version of Internet Explorer.
So I was interested to see a link to an informal check carried out by Etre (the company that does the eye-tracking stuff I mentioned seeing in one of the presentations at that Online Public Services conference I chaired a few weeks back). They checked the home pages of the websites of the FTSE-100 companies in IE6 and IE7, to see how many fell apart in IE7.
And did they find the web in meltdown? Well, no, not really. 87 of the 100 sites displayed and functioned identically in the two versions of IE, and in the 13 others, the differences were pretty small.
Now they say themselves that this was far from a truly scientific survey, and they looked just at the front page of each site. It’s quite possible that horrors lurk below the surface of some of these sites, but given the lack of standards compliance that one tends to find on these corporate sites, it may be that the release of IE7 won’t cause quite such a mess on the web as some feared.
Mind you - if you do find any sites which work in IE6 but fall apart in a serious way in IE7, do post the details here so we can all take a look. :)
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