Posted on Sunday, December 02 2007 @ 19:48 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
A member of the Internet Explorer developer team announced on the
IEBlog that over 300 million people in the world are now using Internet Explorer 7:
It’s been a little over a year since we released IE7 on Windows XP and for Windows Vista, so I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about where we are after the year.
According to internal Microsoft research based on data from Visual Sciences Corporation, there are over 300 million users are experiencing the web with IE7. This makes IE7 the second most popular browser after IE6. IE7 is already #1 in the US and UK, and we expect IE7 to surpass IE6 worldwide shortly.
Perhaps more important than the overall numbers is the positive impact IE7 has made for our users. As you know, we focused a lot on improving security in IE7. We believe IE 7 is the safest Microsoft browser released to date. According to a vulnerability report published today, IE7 has fewer vulnerabilities than previous versions of IE over the same time period. What’s more, the report showed that IE7 had both fewer fixed and unfixed vulnerabilities in the first year than the other browsers we compared.
In addition to having fewer vulnerabilities, as we previously mentioned, IE 7’s Phishing Filter stops more than 900,000 phishing attempts per week, stopping crimes-in-progress before users give up their personal information. On top of that, more sites are adopting Extended Validation Certificates as a way to help protect their users from fraud, and people are noticing. A recent USA Today article noted that “for the ultimate peace of mind, look for the address bar to turn green in IE7” in the context of securely connecting with your broker.
Finally, we’ve seen a decrease of 10-20% in the support call volume for IE compared with a year ago, before the release of IE7. This is typically a sign that the product is more stable and has fewer issues than the previous release.
The IE7 adoption figures don't sound too bad but are pretty easy to achieve if you take in mind that Windows Vista users receive it by default and Windows XP users are somewhat forced to update.
