IE7 Launch Week: What Broke, and What It Rewarded

Internet Explorer 7 shipped October 18. Because it arrives through Windows Update, adoption is not a curve so much as a step: millions of machines in the first weeks, whether site owners prepared or not. We spent June telling you to audit. We spent last week watching the results roll in. Consider this the field report.

The pattern in who broke

The satisfying finding first: sites built cleanly to standards passed essentially untouched. Not because IE7 is perfect, but because code written to the specification lands close to what a more compliant browser expects. Our founding promise got its first large-scale test, and we will take the result.

The breakage clustered exactly where June’s audit predicted: sites whose layouts leaned on IE6-specific hacks. The old tricks stopped applying in IE7 while some of the quirks they patched lingered. The result was the launch-week gallery everyone saw. Overlapping columns, collapsed floats, navigation wandering to creative new places. None of it mysterious. All of it foreseeable. Most of it, on prepared sites, fixed before the 18th.

What we fixed, and how

For the few client sites that needed launch-week attention, the fix followed the plan. Rewrite the broken CSS correctly. Then quarantine any remaining IE6 corrections into a conditional-comment stylesheet, Microsoft’s own clean targeting mechanism. The main stylesheet stays tidy. The old browser’s fixes live in a labeled file waiting to be deleted in a few years.

The timeline from here deserves a calendar note. Microsoft says IE7 reaches Automatic Updates in the coming weeks, which is when adoption really jumps. Home machines first, then the slower institutional wave as IT departments approve the rollout. Corporate environments can block the upgrade, and many will. That is why we keep IE6 in first-class support: the audiences most likely to lag are exactly the procurement offices, hospital desktops, and campus labs that institutional sites serve. Plan for years of coexistence.

Worth knowing as you test: IE7 fixes a lot, including the legendary layout bugs and transparent PNG support at last. It is not a standards paragon. Plenty of modern CSS remains unsupported. The gap narrowed a great deal. It did not close.

What to tell the people who sign the checks

If you are briefing leadership this month, here is the framing that lands. A mandatory software update is rolling out to most of our visitors on Microsoft’s schedule, not ours. Exposure was known or unknown depending on whether you audited in advance. The cost falls into the maintenance budget or the emergency budget accordingly.

Leadership does not need the CSS details. They need to know whether this was managed or suffered, and the difference between those two words is the entire case for the maintenance line item that keeps getting deferred. Weeks like this one are when that line item is easiest to defend. Use the moment.

A word for anyone who depends on vendor-supplied pieces, like commerce platforms or purchased CMS themes: their IE7 status is your IE7 status. The vendors who shipped fixes ahead of launch told you something about their engineering culture. The ones promising patches ‘soon’ told you something too. File both facts where buying decisions get made.

Quieter changes worth noting

Beyond rendering, tabbed browsing arrives for the IE majority, which subtly changes how people read sites. More parallel browsing, more pages opened for later. The RSS button now sits in the toolbar, so if your site publishes a feed, it just got more visible. And the new security features mostly matter to application developers, but the direction is one we expect to continue.

The browser math this changes

Numbers, because support decisions should rest on them. IE entered launch week with roughly eight visitors in ten on typical institutional sites. Firefox holds about one in eight and keeps climbing. Windows Update will now migrate the IE column from 6 to 7 over the coming months, quickly for home users and slowly for institutional desktops.

Practical translation: IE6 remains a first-class testing target well into 2008. IE7 joins it immediately. And the sites that get to relax are the ones whose CSS treats both as details rather than foundations.

This is also the moment to write down a browser support policy. Ours runs in tiers. Full support for the browsers that carry real share on that client’s own analytics. Functional support for the minor players, where everything works but pixel perfection is not promised. And graceful degradation as the floor beneath everything, which clean markup provides nearly free. Writing the policy down turns every future ‘does it work in X?’ conversation from a negotiation into a reference.

The lesson worth banking

Browser change is now permanent weather. Five years passed between IE6 and IE7, an anomaly born of a monopoly with no competition. That era is over. Firefox took enough share to force Microsoft back into shipping, and IE8 planning is already underway. The next transition will come sooner.

That reframes the economics. Clean, standards-based building used to look like craftsmanship for its own sake, the kind of virtue that loses budget arguments. Launch week settled it. The standards-built sites spent this month doing nothing. The hack-built sites spent it on emergency triage during fall campaign season. That is what the maintenance budget buys.

If your site came through untouched, your builders earned their fee. Tell them we said so. If launch week was expensive, fix toward standards rather than new hacks, and this particular bill never needs paying again.