It’s taken nearly 18 months, but our internal browser usage statistics show that users of Internet Explorer 7 have finally become the largest user base for our website.

In January 2007, 55.99% of visitors to the large e-commerce store I work for, used Internet Explorer 6 to browse the site. Last week, Internet Explorer 7 finally exceeded that figure at 56.34%.

This is of course good for web standards, and along with Firefox and Safari, about 65% of our visitors now have web standards browsers. Unfortunately, users of Internet Explorer 6 still amount to 27.5% which is a huge amount. Granted, our customer base is less ‘tech savvy’ than most, but IE6 still has an alarming number of users, and I was sincerely hoping it would drop off sooner than that.

Maybe the impending release of Internet Explorer 8 will chivvy a few people into updating, but until then, we’ve still got to consider these guys when developing and designing. Ho Hum.