IE7 Priority Update

In case you haven't heard, IE7 is going to be released as a priority upgrade, which means that it will be automatically downloaded for most users. Not everyone installs all priority updates, of course, and there will be usual tool to allow businesses to block the download if they're not ready to upgrade. Nonetheless, this means we'll see much higher adoption rates that we were expecting.

The interesting thing now is reading the debate going on in the community over how long we should continue to support IE6, and even whether this means we can discontinue support for IE5.

While I sympathize with people who cannot upgrade to IE7 (which will only work on XP SP2) and especially those who can't even upgrade to IE6, I don't see any reason why we need to have this debate – it's exactly the same as when we stopped supporting NN4.

There was no single industry-wide cutoff date for dropping NN4 support, it just petered out over a few years. The same thing will happen with IE5. Hell, we already skip IE5 testing unless the client specifically requests it.

The way I see this going in most cases is that we'll design for standards first, meaning test in Firefox, Safari and IE7. Then we'll test in older browsers like IE5 and IE6. If the results are acceptable (or easily fixed) then we support them. If the results are unacceptable and would take too long to fix (and the client isn't demanding it), then we just block the stylesheet from those browsers.

Just like with NN4, the users will see all the content and can still use the site, but they don't get the pretty design.