IE7 Requirements: Let's Target Win2K and Win9x Users!
Well, IE7 is out. As we've known for over a year, it's only available to people using Windows XP or later, and only those on the latest service pack. Windows XP is the most commonly used operating system out there right now, but there are still quite a few users of Windows 2000 (especially businesses that have standardized on it) and Windows 98 (mostly home users, I'd expect). You can still find people using Windows Me and even Windows 95!
As an example: My website gets 83.2% of its hits from Windows XP, 4.5% from Windows 2000, 2.1% from Windows 98 and 1% from Windows Me.
All these people with older versions of Windows can't upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. Here's where Firefox comes in. Firefox will run on all of these operating systems. One component of the Firefox 2 promotion should be a campaign aimed at these Win9x/Me/2k users who can't upgrade Internet Explorer, but can still get a modern web browser by installing Firefox. (I wrote a post on my own blog on this subject a few days ago.)
The only problem with this scenario is that Firefox 3 won't run on Win9x/Me. We might risk alienating people if we encourage them to switch to Firefox since they can't upgrade IE, then 8 months from now they can't upgrade Firefox either.
