IE browsers are used by 80% of internet users, said usability
consultancy Etre, which carried out the survey on companies in the
FTSE 100 index of leading UK listed companies.
"On Friday 20th October – just two days after IE7 was
released – we kicked off a short internal study," said a statement
from Etre. "We fired up two machines and compared the homepages of
all one hundred FTSE 100 companies in both IE6 and IE7. Were these
companies ready for IE7? Were their sites bent badly out of shape?
Or has this all been a big fuss over nothing?"
The company found that the websites of 13 out of the FTSE 100
companies faced some sort of problem relating to IE7. "Problems
ranged from warped page layouts (Alliance and Leicester) to small
presentation glitches (Hanson)," it said.
The companies whose sites faced some problems were: Alliance
& Leicester; BHP Billiton; BP; British Energy Group; Compass
Group; Hanson; Lloyds TSB; Northern Rock; Sage Group; Shire
Pharmaceuticals Group; Standard Life; Unilever; and Yell Group.
Though Etre admitted that this was not necessarily a
statistically significant enough sample with which to extrapolate
to the whole internet, it said that if the same proportions of
general websites suffered problems as FTSE 100 company websites
did, then 12.7 million sites will need some work as a result of the
release of IE7.
Microsoft has been warning that the engine inside IE7 is quite
different to that inside IE6, and that companies need to test their
web pages against the new browser.
The release of IE7 is likely to have a massive effect because it
is being installed via Windows' 'automatic update' feature, so will
become the default browser on millions of computers simultaneously.
That update happens on Wednesday 1st November.
Surprisingly, though, it may be the FTSE 100 companies'
unwillingness to embrace internet site standards, which are
designed to ease accessibility and usability, which prevented the
problem from being more severe.
"It is worth pointing out however that the general lack of
adherence to web standards amongst the FTSE 100 companies may have
insulated them somewhat from IE7's various bugs and glitches," said
the Etre statement. "IE7 tends to struggle most with
standards-compliant sites – particularly those using hacks and
filters to achieve decent presentation in IE6. Given that most
sites aren't standards-compliant however, we think our results are
pretty representative."
