IE7 Announced for Longhorn and WinXP

sriram_2001 writes "There is now an official announcement from Bill Gates on Internet Explorer 7. It will be available in beta form this summer for Longhorn and XP SP2. The IEBlog has commentary about the decision making process that went into the new browser version." Coming on the heels of the June Beta announcement for Longhorn, if things go as planned it will likely be here in early summer. The new browser's early arrival was first discussed last year.

Comments

I wonder what MS has stolen from firefox

[Prophetic_Truth]

Who wants to bet we'll see 'tabs' in IE7

Re:I wonder what MS has stolen from firefox

[frankthechicken]

More importantly, will Microsoft be willing to include an Adblock of some form?

Somehow I doubt that owners of websites/advertisers would appreciate such a move.

Re:Yippee

[pilgrim23]

I rememeber reading once that IE loads into memory at boot. That is, IE is substantially tied in as a portion of the operating system itself. This makes for superb integration with the UI for all system tasks, it also results in blazing fast speed as a browser. It ALSO means any threat to the browser becomes by nature a threat to the entire computer, its system its data, its hardware, and its user. If IE 7 has been decoupled from Windows that would be the one greatest security improvement Microsoft could perform.

valid CSS and FULLY supported PNG?

[OmniVector]

if we got just these two things, and nothing else, i might actually stop slitting my wrists as a web designer. PLEASE MICROSOFT. PLEASE. that's all i want god damnit.

Not gonna happen

[jfengel]

MS really depends on blazing performance to keep its users happy. Shipping IE separately means an upgrade to those internal components, not delivery of a separate product. I doubt you'll be able to use it alongside the existing IE, for example.

It's terrible for security, but MS's approach to security has never been to contain threats. Their approach heen been much more all-or-nothing; ActiveX signed certificates means that the program is either trusted or it's not.

Security is always a double-edged sword. Users hate it when security interferes with them, and if it gets in their way before they see the benefits of whatever you're selling them, they'll pick something less safe but whose benefits are more clearly visible.

It's vaguely possible that in Longhorn they might alter some of those balances between security and performance, since .NET gives you more control, but I'm betting not for this upgrade. Most users will always equate "faster" with "better", and "more secure" will come in a distant third.

Re:Wow. It's been a long time since Microsoft blin

[ptlis]

Doubtful. Unlike Netscape Navigator, Mozilla Firefox is not a commercial product and as such it doesn't need to keep getting new users at a high rate (to sustain it's influx of cash) - as long as there are people using at and developers refining it then it will live. Furthermore I feel strongly that the momentum behind Firefox now is such that Microsoft/IE won't ever be able to crush it and regain almost total market dominance... this can only be a good thing for Joe Public and for web developers everywhere because Microsoft will be forced to start improving IE & the lack of market dominance means that MS-only (x)html tags should start appearing again.