Drupal 8 will Drop Support for IE7
Drupal is the latest to join the growing chorus of announcements from companies who are dropping IE7 support. Drupal 8 is expected to be complete by 2013 or 2014 and will drop support for IE7 due to declining IE7 usage. These numbers are being pushed even lower as Microsoft introduces its automatic upgrade process for IE6 and IE7.
The current statistics from Stat Counter show that in January 2012, 3.63% of users were using IE7, which is down from 4% in December 2011. This demonstrates the diminishing usage of IE7, as well as its clear downward trend. The people behind the Drupal development team have made the correct decision, particularly when considering the amount of extra work that is required in supporting IE7.
Facebook is also phasing out IE7. The new timeline profile is not viewable on IE7 and it is expected that Facebook will eventually cease all support for IE7, as it did with IE6. Facebook have not stated this officially, but based on how Facebook have completely ceased support for IE6 and started a similar phase process with IE7, this is the likely to be the long term path for IE7 as well. Facebook do not explicitly state which browsers they support, except that they support the up to date versions of the major browsers.
In June 2011 Google announced that Google Apps would not longer support IE7. The reason for this is that new features would require most modern up to date browsers. One example is the drag and drop upload feature, which requires html 5. In fact, the lack of support for IE7 will eventually extend to Google Calendar as well as Google Talk and potentially more of Google’s line of products.
Jquery 2.0 may drop IE6 to IE 8 support upon its release. The developers are still considering this, so this is not confirmed yet. If they decide to cease this support, it is likely that a plugin will be made available which makes Jquery 2.0 compatible with these versions of Internet Explorer.
When Drupal 8 is released, IE7 usage rates will almost certainly drop even more significantly, at which point the usage rates may be so low that Drupal webmasters will be hardly concerned that such few users will not have proper access enabled for their websites.
Mitchel Xavier is a Drupal development expert and creates Drupal web design solutions for businesses in Sydney Australia.
Good riddance! Hope to see a more standardized Internet in the future with IE phasing out in general…