At over six months since it was made available to the public, Internet Explorer 7 has hit the wall. The browser's adoption rate is down and almost stagnating. The uptake of Microsoft's latest version of the IE browser, which has performed excellently between the end of October 2006 and January 2007, surpassing the 100 millions IE7 installations as of January 8, 2007, has begun to stall since February.

The initial adoption of IE7 had a fast pace, according to data published by Market Share by Net Applications. Internet Explorer 7 jumped from 3.18% in October 2006, to 8.84% in November, 18.26% in December, and 25.01% in January 2007. Even the transition from January to February, which marked the general availability of Windows Vista (IE7 also shipping with the operating system), showed signs of a slow down in uptake. IE7 only managed to increase its market share to 29.12% in February, 29.99% in March and 30.56% in April, 2007. In the past two months, IE7 delivered the worst uptake performance since its release.

"In the last three months, IE7's growth has slowed to a trickle," commented Geoff Johnston, analyst at metrics firm WebSideStory. "IE7 has a decent enough number -- 31% as of last week -- but IE6 is still higher, at 46%-47%. Consumer apathy, or laziness, is extremely difficult to overcome. Lots of people are obviously quite happy with IE6 and don't see any reason to upgrade as long as it's working for them."

In addition to the IE6 home users, who have declined the automatic updates of Internet Explorer 7 served directly by Microsoft via AU, corporate customers are also notoriously slow in adopting new software versions. Mozilla has experienced a similar trend with Firefox 2.0, which only accounts for a market share of 10.23% out of Firefox's total 15.42%. Even when it comes to the open source browser, users are sticking with version 1.5 even though Mozilla will kill support in mid May 2007.

But in addition to the corporate environment, IE7 adoption is also hurt by IE6 users with pirated versions of Windows, that are unable to access IE7 downloads, as their operating systems will fail the validation performed by the Windows Genuine Advantage mechanism. Internet Explorer owned a market share of 78.03% in April, but its position is continuously eroding in favor of Firefox.