Categories: Web

Facebook phasing out support for IE7

IE7 has a market share of around 4%

One year after Facebook officially renounced support for Internet Explorer 6, it seems that Internet Explorer 7 is destined to experience a similar fate as support for the ailing browser is lacking in Facebook’s most important recent innovation – Timeline.

Facebook Timeline, Facebook’s radical new profile redesign first introduced in September and made available to all earlier this month, does not support IE7. IE7 users visiting profile pages that would otherwise be Timeline-enabled are presented with the old Facebook profile design, complete with a number of very evident styling issues caused by IE7’s treatment of the style sheet language CSS.

Facebook has opted against partial Timeline support in IE7, instead choosing to ignore this browser version altogether, suggesting that this is the beginning of plans to phase-out support for Microsoft’s five year-old browser.

Facebook’s refusal to support IE7 in Timeline is bold but nevertheless comes as no great surprise. Earlier this year Google announced that it would no longer officially support IE7 in many of its popular services, including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. IE7’s global market share continues to dwindle, now standing at a little over 4%, and just 2.2% above the ever-enduring IE6.

For those that have enabled Timeline on their profile but want to revert back to the old design for whatever reason, Facebook’s non-support of IE7 offers a simple solution – either by loading-up the ancient browser or by setting your user-agent to IE7 in Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

Image courtesy of robceemoz on Flickr.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

View Comments

  • Hate to break it to you, but we just haven't finished working out all the kinks for Timeline in IE 6 and 7 yet. We still support both those browsers and have no immediate plans on dropping their support. I would strongly recommend not masking your user agent as IE7 because it will force Facebook to send alternate styles and scripts to your browser and may cause Facebook to display incorrectly or some features not to work in the correct way for your browser.

    • @Stefan Parker Well that is unfortunate to hear. A big company like Facebook with a huge user base could be a force for change in the browser world, by pushing the remaining people off of IE6 and IE7.

    • @Stefan Parker I'd hate to be the engineer(s) working on IE6/7 compatibility. That must be a frustrating endeavor.

  • Hate to break it to you, but we just haven't finished working out all the kinks for Timeline in IE 6 and 7 yet. We still support both those browsers and have no immediate plans on dropping their support. I would strongly recommend not masking your user agent as IE7 because it will force Facebook to send alternate styles and scripts to your browser and may cause Facebook to display incorrectly or some features not to work in the correct way for your browser.

    • @Stefan Parker Well that is unfortunate to hear. A big company like Facebook with a huge user base could be a force for change in the browser world, by pushing the remaining people off of IE6 and IE7.

    • @Stefan Parker I'd hate to be the engineer(s) working on IE6/7 compatibility. What a worthless endeavor.

    • @Stefan Parker I'd hate to be the engineer(s) working on IE6/7 compatibility. That must be a frustrating endeavor.

    • @Stefan Parker Please at least stop supporting IE6...it has to die. Be a good web citizen Facebook!

  • @khenney I despise IE7. It has to be the most non compliant browser produced by Microsoft. Good riddens.

  • @khenney I despise IE7. It has to be the most non compliant browser produced by Microsoft. Good riddens.

Recent Posts

WEF founder launches ‘Schwab Academy’ to guide humanity through the ‘Intelligent Age’

At the age of 87 World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab finds a new…

7 hours ago

From Pilots to Practice. What Healthcare Professionals Say About AI.

AI is quickly becoming part of the healthcare toolkit. It’s reshaping how care is delivered,…

1 day ago

Latin America to host conference on AI and Industrial Innovation 

Latin America is set to welcome leading professionals of the industrial maintenance sector to the…

2 days ago

Immigrants power over half of U.S. unicorns- now they have their own summit 

Immigrants in the U.S. are behind 55% of unicorn startups- valued at $1 billion USD…

3 days ago

Alternative App Stores Are Opening Up On iOS: Onside and Playgama Bring 300 Million Gamers to Europe’s iPhones

Europe’s digital landscape is entering into a new phase of openness. For the first time,…

6 days ago

The ‘DARPAVERSE’ is coming to model, simulate & optimize military operations

DARPA is metaphorically manifesting Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and strife, by attempting to…

1 week ago