Heikniemi Hardcoded

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.