Internet Explorer 8 Released, IE6 down 8.8% in NZ in 8 Months.
Do you remember what you were doing when the planes hit the buildings in New York, September 11th 2001?
Did you know that two weeks before that event IE6 was released to the web?
What else was happening around that time?
- Trade Me had less than 30,000 customers
- The first generation 5GB ipod was released
- The PS1 had been for sale for almost a year
- Gladiator was named Best Picture
- Russell Crowe won best actor
- A patent describing the Google PageRank mechanism was granted.
It seems like ages ago doesn’t it? Seven and a half years after IE6 we have released Internet Explorer 8!
I previous blogged about the custom version of IE8 that Yellow created for their customers.
Since then Keith at markerstudio has shared a bit more info about the project. Of particular interest to me are these two comments:
The launch has been very successful with over 10,000 downloads of the Yellow IE8 browser in the first 2 days!
I would like people to note that the Live Search apis were superior [to Google] in terms of the range of ways one could consume search services, and relevance in my book is very comparable between the two.
It is a shame technical capability doesn’t = customer brand perception in relation to search but I guess that it is simply a commercial reality.
Who else has released a custom version of IE8 in the New Zealand market?
Like Yellow, YahooXtra has a targeted promotion of their custom version of IE8 on the front page of their site. Interestingly they have chosen not to created a 64-bit version, I guess not that many of their target users have >= 4GB of RAM on their machines.
That leads me to msn.co.nz who are disappointingly absent with their custom version today. Australia has their version out but NZ is still two weeks away from launch due to last minute adjustments to ensure local relevance.
Visiting the msn NZ custom version page gives you a “coming soon” message.
Update: The MSN New Zealand custom version of IE8 is now available for 32 Bit Vista and XP users by visiting https://tr.im/msnie8.
If you are interested in publishing add-ons for Internet Explorer you can do so by creating an account at https://ieaddons.com and clicking on your account to upload. Unfortunately there isn’t a market specifically for NZ so you will need to choose US or UK to publish your work to.
I noticed that Yellow Search (from their custom IE8 version) is now published and available in the gallery.
Touching on the brand perception of Google for search in New Zealand the same is true for Internet Explorer when it comes to using the Internet. Many New Zealander’s still think of the Internet as a “blue e on their desktop”, the particular version is somewhat irrelevant to most. The problem here is that if users don’t upgrade web developers around the world spend more and more time hitting their heads against the wall.
Over the last few months web developers at some of New Zealand's largest corporates tell me that their IT departments still deploy new desktop computers with standardised builds of Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6! This continues to concern me and I am talking with Microsoft account managers to see how we can change this.
Eight months ago we started our process to Get rid of IE6 in New Zealand, now it is time to once again check in on how we are doing?
The good news is that we removed 8.76% of Internet Explorer 6 from New Zealand forever! The bad news is that IE6 still makes up 13.6% of New Zealand web users.
Further more we are now making it far easier to test your web applications on IE6 without actually needing to have IE6 installed.
At MIX09 last we we announced “SuperPreview”
Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer is a visual debugging tool that makes it easier to migrate your Web sites from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7 or 8.
Below is a list of all of the MIX09 sessions on Internet Explorer: