IE7 Announced

There have been rumours floating around for a while about a new version of IE, planned for release later this year. Bill Gates has gone and officially announced it (no release date yet), along with a statement that the anti spyware software (currently in beta) will be provided free to existing Windows customers.

So what will it include? You can scour the IE feature request wiki for an idea of what might be included; my money's on the antispyware being bundled with IE in some way (i.e. as part of a service pack to XP that would include IE7, anti spyware, and maybe "Avalon" & "Indigo", though depends what kind of release schedule we're looking at).

In any case, they're touting security as the number 1 concern for IE7, but they're going to have to give us something big and interesting to tempt people back from Firefox. At the end of the day, security's important, but highly boring.

You'll find lots of references to "tabbed browsing" on the wiki - it seems that's the main feature request; personally, I think this is a red herring. Tabs have become a symbol of a stagnating IE - while other browsers have continued to evolve, IE has just had continuous security patches released. Firefox is liked so much because it's open source, anyone can contribute, and new features are based on what people really want; it's also easily extensible, so any old geek can write an extension or plug-in and show it off.

Personally, I tried Firefox, and, yeah, it's ok; but it wasn't good enough for me to make it my default browser (note to Firefox zealots - I'm not an MS-zombie - if their products suck I'm happy to say so). What I like about Firefox is not the product, but the spirit in which it was created - it's an open platform (it's extensible in a way IE isn't), it has good support for open web standards, and is (apparently) secure. Yet, I'm not going to go with it just because it's not MS, or as a protest at IE being left to stagnate.

So, I'll be very interested to see what's going to appear in the beta, due some time this year. In the meantime, you may be interested in the following: http://bertc.com/billgates.htm