Overall, THIS LAMP readers must be intelligently a cut above the herd. I say this because although global statistics show Internet Explorer 6 usage at a mind-boggling 86% (which is actually down from last year), over the past few months only about 50% of visitors to my site continue to use it. Most use Firefox, followed by those who have been using the IE7 beta, followed by Safari (available for the the Mac OS only) users.

I have repeatedly urged Windows users to abandon IE6, which has not been significantly updated since 2001 and has not kept up with advances in Internet standards. And of course by security standards, IE6 has also been the clear loser. Over the past few months, I have continually had to "dumb down" my website so that IE6 users can make sense of it. .PNG graphics don't work correctly in IE6, and neither do cascading style sheets.

So, all that to say...if you are still using Windows Internet Explorer 6, welcome to 2003 because Internet Explorer 7 is now available for download and will bring you up to date with web standards that the rest of us have been using for awhile, including tabbed browsing and integrated RSS feeds.

IE 7 can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ and in the next few weeks will become part of the automatically downloaded updates in Windows XP.

Of course I still recommend you just get a Mac instead, but if you can't do that, at least use a modern web browser.

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Update: IE7 has not even been out yet for 24 hours and a security flaw has already been discovered. IE7 is still better than IE6, but other options may be a better choice.

Tags: Windows, Macintosh