The First Year of IE7
It's been a little over a year since we released IE7 on Windows XP and for Windows Vista, so I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about where we are after the year. — According to internal Microsoft research based on data from Visual Sciences Corporation …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year ago Microsoft could report momentum and erosion at once: InformationWeek counted 100 million IE7 installs in January 2007 while noting the browser was still losing overall share, and CNET had flagged early IE7 bugs back when development began. By October the team was shipping a cumulative IE7 update, and now the anniversary post pivots from features to security statistics drawn from internal research using Visual Sciences Corporation data.
The framing did not travel unchallenged. The story drew unusually wide pickup — two eWEEK pieces, Ryan Naraine's Zero Day, and a direct rebuttal from Mozilla's Mike Shaver titled 'counting still easy, critical thinking still surprisingly hard' — turning a corporate retrospective into a public argument over whose browser-security numbers count.
First-order effects
- IT buyers weighing IE7 against Firefox now face two competing datasets: Microsoft's Visual Sciences-based internal figures versus Mozilla's methodological counterattack, so the decision input shifts from release notes to whose measurement methodology survives scrutiny.
- Mozilla is pulled into defending Firefox on Microsoft-chosen ground — responding point-by-point to rival-published security comparisons rather than setting its own agenda.
Second-order effects
- Browser vendors are pushed to institutionalize their own telemetry operations, since the side that publishes comparative numbers first frames the debate — analytics firms like Visual Sciences become strategic suppliers in the platform war, not just web-measurement vendors.
- The dispute pressures both camps toward verifiable, externally auditable security reporting, because a claim resting solely on internal data invites exactly the rebuttal Shaver mounted.
Third-order effects
- If vendor-published security scorecards become the norm, browser competition structurally moves from feature cadence to a running statistical contest — with the unresolved question being whether any neutral party can arbitrate claims built on proprietary telemetry.
The trend: The browser wars are entering a phase where vendors compete through published security and adoption statistics — and rebuttals to them — as much as through software releases.