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MSIE 7 May Beat Longhorn Out The Gate
Quantum Jim writes "InternetNews.com reports that a major upgrade for Microsoft Internet Explorer may be imminent. Apparently in response to the recent mass migration away from MSIE, top Microsoft developers have been soliciting for improvements in the old browser at a web log and at Channel 9, an aggregate journal previously discussed by /.. InternetNews.com speculates that improvements could possibly include support for tabbed browsing, better security, more PNG and CSS compliance, and RSS integration (which Firefox and Opera Mail already support). Go competition!"
That's why they wanted to call it Phoenix....
To say that "Firefox is compliant" is a joke. Firefox aka Gecko is more compliant, but don't be fooled into thinking that it renders everything right all the time. It certainly doesn't. Not to say IE is better.. it's not.
Unluckily, the W3C has made a complete mess of web standards. To the point that there are so many barely used, misunderstood, unclear, ambigious, and depreciated standards that figuring anything out at all is an accomplishment of some scale.
As a web developer / designer, I've been using Mozilla and the like for a long time. But what interests me is what the majority of people use - I need to design stuff that works for everything. Since Explorer has ALWAYS been a pain when it comes to CSS compliance, myself and every designer out there have had to bend over backward to write code that has all these little IE fixes built in. I'm sick of having to play with code and then check both Netscape and Explorer for consistency. Please, oh please, give IE 7 some decent fricken CSS compliance!! That way, I will KNOW that it will all look the bloody same, just like it should for pete's sakes.
The Zeitgeist is from June, before the major effect of the advisories was felt. On my site, IE has slipped a couple percentage points in the past couple months (and it's not a tech site).