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IE7 Released and Available for Download
Luis Escalante writes "After over a year and a half, IE7 has been released to the public as of Monday afternoon. Download it directly here. Word hit the streets after several mangers of the IE division posted on the IE blog."
Once again, competition wins. Microsoft, after leveraging their monopoly power to win the browser wars, had summarily decided that there was no longer anything else in IE that needed work. IE was effectively frozen for years, bugs and all - cracked open, by stern policy, only for security fixes.
It took a free software effort with no hope of profit to do so, but MS has at long, long last bestirred themselves to code again. This has once again demonstrated the baseline of what MS' monopoly will do. Since it is not economically feasible to confront MS's monopoly powers, the commercial market for product X (browsers, office apps, OSs, etc) is effectively destroyed (sorry Opera), but at a minimum, MS is forced to compete against what the community can develop for free.
Never forget - human beings are lazy by design, and so are our organizations. No business, no politician, no religious leader, will exhibit much virtue except under threat. This is why competition and democracy have been largely effective as policy.
Whether MS wins or loses the browser war (or these days, the browser cold war), or the OS war, we have already won, because we have pushed them to innovate, to make their products more stable, more credible, and more powerful.
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How come this is on Slashdot before news about Flash Player 9 for Linux?
Let's see now.. It's the world's most widely used internet browser. It's probably the most commonly used application in the world. It marks the date when Microsoft finally started to worry about Firefox. It is a huge improvement over IE6. Yeah, I guess that makes this news more important, despite the fact that Slashdot is more Linux oriented.
Last but not least, your complaint is ignorant because not only is there no such thing as a race for news, but a lot of people might find the IE vs FF wars more interesting, too. You know, almost 90 percent of the world's users browse with IE, so there's a pretty good chance that at least a few Slashdot users will enjoy this story.
Full Tilt
Hmm... Number of people worldwide who use Internet Explorer vs. number of people worldwide who (a) use Linux, (b) want to have Flash animations in their browser, and (c) are OK with installing the proprietary Flash player.
I'd say based on numbers alone, the new IE release qualifies as "stuff that matters."
(P.S. Thanks for the link -- that's great news!)
What's that sound?
Oh yeah, it's thousands of webmasters scrambling to test their sites on the latest mutilation of web standards.