Possibly the most important thing web developers need to learn about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 beta is that it breaks one of their favorite advertising options: Google AdSense.
I noticed this today, that none of my ads were appearing in IE7. Considering that by the end of the year, IE7 should be available for almost all versions of Windows, unless Microsoft wants to face the ire of developers everywhere, it had better fix this. According to a poster at Digital Point, the bug is not evident in the version of Internet Explorer in Windows Vista build 5270.
There is one possibility: that IE7’s new security features block AdSense by decision, some security default that blocks certain types of JavaScript, something that would force Google to alter the way Google serves AdSense ads just to avoid losing a large percentage of the two billion a year AdSense pulls in. I wonder what other methods you could serve ads by? Maybe installing some code on your server that processes the ads locally and serves them as local JavaScript? I guess it all depends on what is causing the bug, and whether the IE team is willing to write an exception.
Oh, and Chitika doesn’t work either.
UPDATE: I’m also seeing those ad links within articles, the ones that hotlink random words to useless ads, not working in IE7. Example on this page.
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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