One of the things I'm most curious about with the upcoming (today?) release of IE7 is the adoption rate. I mean, whatever problems it might bring to the table (and there will be some *), it's going to be an improvement over IE6 in a lot of fundamental ways and will allow me to do a lot of basic things that I want to do all the time (min-width/ max-width anyone?) with a lot less hassle.** The thing is, we have to (mostly) vanquish IE6 before the "good" times can really roll. To that end, I'm going to be checking the browser stats for my sites a lot more often than I have been. Here's what they look like today for the month of October so far :

Raw Requests (overall percentage of requests to my server)

1. 50.09% MSIE 6.*
2. 33.62% Mozilla/5.* (Skewed percentage-wise since I've been working/testing on my server a lot this month. Most of the people I work with use Firefox and I use it as my primary browser.)
3. 2.37% Mozilla/4.* (Mostly IE7)
4. 1.09% MSIE 5.*
5. 0.72% MSIE 4.*

Google Analytics (these are more representative of what the public is actually using)
Overall numbers:

1. Internet Explorer 70.53%
2. Firefox 21.07%
3. Mozilla 1.71%

IE Breakdown:

1. Internet Explorer 6.0 95.46%
2. Internet Explorer 7.0 2.32%
3. Internet Explorer 5.5 1.01%
4. Internet Explorer 5.0 0.50%

I'll continue to check this over the next few months with my fingers crossed for a rapid adoption rate.

* For example, one of the pre-release versions I tested on in the spring was significantly slower rendering transparent PNGs than the ActiveX filter method in place for IE5.5 and IE6.0. If it's not a lot faster (and I think it will be) there's the potential for two separate IE-specific sheets for any pages that use transparent PNGs.

**var hassle="conditional comments serve an IE specific sheet and then I hit them with this " + width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 800? '768px': '100%' );