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

Yippee

[nkuzmik]

Any word yet on substantive changes? Like separating IE from the fabric of the OS?

A friend's computer is virtually unusable because something corrupted IE, and that in turn broke Windows Explorer.

So?

[FuzzzyLogik]

This is disappointing because we all know microsoft won't fill the giant security hole that is active x. Sure they have a "popup blocker" and this beta will have "tabs." But will it actually follow the W3C standards or is it going to be as hard to work with as IE6? I mean we KNOW they won't clean the issues up because they're releasing their own Anti-Spyware application. So really, what's the point?

The real question is:

[lucabrasi999]

Will all you Firefox users now be quiet? Oh, they are talking about me, as well?

IE.Net?

[Repugnant_Shit]

I think the most interesting question about IE7 is: will it be written with .Net? Microsoft seems to think that developers should all jump on the .Net bandwagon, but they seem rather reluctanct to do it with any of their big products.

IE.Net (or rather, mshtml.Net) would be a great way to show off the supposed security enhancements that .Net brings.

(Aside: Is Visual Studio now written in .Net? If it is, no wonder it's so much slower than VS6.)

Re:I wonder what MS has stolen from firefox

[shokk]

I don't see any benefit to an IE7 without the tabbed browsing. It's just such a big part of the browsing experience these days that I couldn't image being without it. In fact, I invite them to take all keystroke commands used by Firefox tabbed browsing just to keep things consistent. There are times when you just have to use IE and for those times they should want to appear as similar to Moz/FF as possible.

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

[Ziviyr]

I fail to see how they admitted that IE is weak.

Microsoft terminates work on IE, they own the browser market, spyware runs rampant, all is good in the universe.

Firefox appears and chomps into their dominance, offering features and spyware noncompliance that makes IE6 look like a Microsoft product.

Microsoft internally goes,
shit, our browser marketshare is weak, people are acting like IE is a Microsoft product for once! We need to make it look better, pull the browser team back together, do something, and up the version number!

Actually, I dunno why they give a damn about browser marketshare, ignoring that having a dominant browser that only really works on their platform keeps people using their cash-cow OS so they can view MS-HTML websites without difficulty and reap the latest in spyware technology.

Re:I wonder what MS has stolen from firefox

[pbranes]

Its pretty likely that the png & css problems will be fixed because when the ie 7 team at MS was formed, they acknowledged that these problems were one of the driving forces for reestablishing the team.

As far as tabbed browsing & mouse gestures, well MS has been pretty smug in saying they provide what their customers are asking for & they aren't asking for tabbed browsing & mouse gestures - so probably not.

Re:Maybe they'll do it right this time...

[Palshife]

So...standards compliance?

Re:valid CSS and FULLY supported PNG?

[Anonymous Coward]

This shouldn't be modded "Funny", it should be modded "So true I'm crying into my vodka".

Unless you are a web developer that has to waste time every day working around Internet Explorer's eight year old screw-ups of the standards, you really don't understand how it feels.

It's like being in an abusive relationship. Microsoft have billions of dollars to fix Internet Explorer, and instead they let it rot for years. But you have no choice but to support it because loads of people still use it.

If you add up all the time I've wasted professionally, working around Microsoft's incompetence, I've probably lost weeks of my life that I'll never get back.

Version numbers as marketing tricks

[Dracos]

Nothing in the press release or IE blog post mentions improved standards support. Mixed in with the "Yay, IE7!" bandwagon blog comments are those from actual web developers still asking for better CSS and PNG support.

Which we won't get. IE7 will be (spurious) security fixes, and the large version increase (6.0 to 7.0) would imply more sweeping changes than SP2 to the Windows security model. That may be, and considering the track record of SP2, also implies more software breaking.

IE7 might include some candy that the average user can comprehend (like tabbed browsing or RSS feeds), but I'd give even odds on that. What we definitely won't see is a fixed CSS box model (or any standards improvements), and native alpha support for PNG. They've made such a mess for themselves out of the rendering engine that they can't fix it without a ground-up rewrite.

MS has no reason to allow people to stay on XP or 2k instead of upgrading to Longhorn in now() + 2 years. IE7 has two purposes:

• to show people that they care about security (while skirting around the fact that their security sucks now)
• to attempt to take some momentum away from Firefox

By not addressing standards at all with this release, the press has no reason to make an issue of it. Mainstream press isn't capable of making the link between standards support and interoperability anyway.

Re:Longhorn and XP converging

[the arbiter]

While I won't use the language that the first replier did, I've got to agree with his fundamental point; if you've really used OSX or Fedora, you wouldn't be saying what you're saying. They're different from Windows, but just as versatile and easy to use.

I'm also not going to accuse you of being a Microsoft shill, but busting out with a marketdroid line like "No OS, however, can truly compare with the compatibility and versatility of the world's most popular OS", well, it's hard for me to believe that you could be anything else.

I suppose it's equally possible that you just work in marketing and describe all things that you like in that manner. But I'm doubtful.

Re:valid CSS and FULLY supported PNG?

[TedTschopp]

You also need them to support that on OSes other than XP. So they need to release standards support on all the OSes which are still under their support clock from MS. So 2000 would need to have all this as well.

The real question is will this raise the bar for minimum features supported by a browser. If they build IE7 and no one upgrades than we are still where we are today.... Screwed.