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It looks like IE 7.0 is going to live up to many expectations of what Microsoft would produce.

In the IE7 dev blog we get an inkling of what is planned. It's mostly security updates.

From what I understand about the security updates, it's primarily a phishing lookup engine that's tacked onto the browser. Maybe people really need phishing protection, I don't know. I don't feel like I need it, but I guess maybe I could be wrong. Shouldn't that feature really be going in the email client, anyway?

What I want is better standards (CSS) support. Maybe Beta 2 will provide more of that. I'm not really asking Microsot to do more than what is already done in other browsers, but at this point might they be better off in grabbing the Firefox source and adding all of this phishing protection garbage to it?

Sure, Firefox isn't perfectly secure (I've had this discussion at length with Pat), but with Microsoft's security initiative coding it, it could become secure, and is already leaps and bounds ahead of IE in terms of CSS standards.

I guess they couldn't do that, though, since all those site out there (mostly corporate sites, unfortunately) that use IE-specific javascript and CSS would suddenly explode.

How sad.

Comments

Comment by blankmeyer on .
blankmeyer
http://asymptomatic.net/2005/08/05/905/ie-70-technical-changes-stink#comment-3324
We are stuck with Internet Explorer until Microsoft decides to drop it and go with something else or developers get it that single-browser compatibility just does not work any more. As alternative browsers become easier and easier to use and gain in popularity, there will be a revolt against sites programmed soley for IE. I don't see Microsoft dropping IE anytime soon (or the code base). If Microsoft were to make a change and move towards better CSS support and dropping some of its own coding (or phasing out the proprietary stuff), they would lose market share. That is unless they could retain users by including new features. It is more likely that it will take 5-10 years for developers to move away from current developement models and begin cross-browser coding. Corporate sites have so much wrapped up in their current deployments, this will be a slow change.