IE7 – what an interesting turn
The announcement of IE7 took me by surprise. Ok, we have no tangible promises on features and "betas during the summer" isn't much said, but still – it's a Redmondian move on the browser field, first significant one after several years of sleeping.
The comments on the IE team blog entry speak volumes. Standards compliance and tabbed browsing seem to be the top requests – no surprises there. Microsoft itself only talks about security, which makes me wonder if it's just going to be IE6 SP3 with a nice name.
On the other hand, if Microsoft doesn't show its innovation muscle now, it will have a very hard time proving itself in the future. The patience of the cutting-edge web users (and developers) is growing thin. At any rate, IE7 should be a good addition to the field – it's very unlikely to be worse than IE6, and it will quite likely mean considerable improvement for those users unwilling or unable to switch browsers.
At best, IE7 will bring us something really new. I wouldn't rule out that possibility either, even in spite of the tight schedule Microsoft has put themselves into. They have surprised me before. Firefox and Opera have had competition in the marketing field, but Microsoft's passiveness has taken a lot away from the evolutionary progress of browsers. Perhaps this will change now? Prodding Microsoft to do this release seems to be one of Firefox's chief achievements so far.
February 16, 2005
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Jouni Heikniemi В· 
One Comment
Posted in: Web
One Response
Jukka K. Korpela - February 18, 2005
I'm afraid IE 7 might be just a collection of security fixes, but the announcement about IE 7 is still an important change in policy.
At best, IE 7 has real XHTML support and, most importantly, an essential improvement to CSS support as regards to selectors. These would make it possible to take real steps forward in WWW authoring in the next few years. Around early 2007, optimistically speaking, authors could even stop doing silly things to be compatible with IE 6 flaws.