Question : IE7 - must we upgrade from IE6?

Are there any reasons for NOT upgrading from IE6 to IE7 on XP systems?
Microsoft classify IE7 as a critical update, so I suppose it's a must do update.

I have it installed already on a small number of machines, and a number of users think it is not very user friendly. Microsoft love to move things around. Always a new learning curve.

Answer : IE7 - must we upgrade from IE6?

Hello Alistair7,

This one is rather hard to answer.

PRO's
- Security: IE 7 contains some security fixes .Of course, every security fix is a must have, since not installing those means you are leaving your system vulnerable.
- Extra functionality. Extra functionality, such as tabs, have been added. These new functions can be quite handy for  the users when they start to use them. I especially like the tabbing system (Though im a Firefox user).

CON's
- The interface. Yup, your users already mentioned it, but i will do so again. Things got moved around, and that makes it quite an annoyance to find the stuff in the first few usages.
- Bugs. A new Microsoft product is not complete without a few bugs. And IE 7 has its share of them. Most of them are just annoyances (such as the Truetype fonts that cause huge CPU usage). Its quite hard to name them all, since not everyone seems to experience every oddity as an annoyance. Even so, you should expect to get more people requesting assistance then regular due to the new interface and the little bugs.
 
Personally i found IE 7 just an attempt from Microsoft to catch up with firefox's development. And while IE certainly got closer to it, i still deem Firefox superior to IE in all aspects, and especially the add-ons for it are great. My own company is using FF as its main browser, and its to the employees liking. Of course that is not what your question is about, but a little bit of extra perspective into the browser market is always nice.

Should you upgrade it? I would answer this with Yes, as its very likely that IE 6 will simply become unsupported by the new patches. Just expect a few more users complaining the first 2-3 weeks about the interface or other small annoyances, but after that's over IE 7 should not create trouble. Not a lot at least.

Kind regards,
~Irial