If they can't keep up with themselves...

Like many web authors, I have a little hidden snippet of code on these pages that records information about visitors - what page they visited, what page they came from, what resolution their screen is, what operating system they use, that kind of thing. It's kind of interesting, and helps me design this and other websites for their target audience. If you limit your log size to the last 500 page views it's also free, courtesy of Statcounter.

Imagine my surprise, then, to see a visitor earlier today who appeared to be surfing from work... at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters. Nothing too surprising in itself - he or she was interested in The Blue Aeroplanes. No, what struck me was this - he or she was using Internet Explorer 7. Okay, so it would have been better still if they were using Firefox or Chrome, but even so, IE7? IE8 has been out for one year and eight months, by my reckoning, and a beta of IE9 is already available. Yet MS are still using IE7. With Javascript disabled. Worried about security loopholes, maybe?

If Microsoft themselves can't keep up-to-date in the browser wars, what hope do the rest of us have? At least my Redmond reader was running Windows 7...