IE 7

Looks like MS have been working on IE7 for at least four months already. As is well-known, the IE team were pretty much disbanded after IE6 was released, and the majority began work on "Avalon" (this is why IE has since stagnated and lost market share to Firefox) . Looks like some of them, including Chris Wilson (who was on the IE team between 1995 and 2001), have now gone back to IE development.

It sounds like MS are going to be making a big push towards standards support in IE7, in a bid to get web developers back on side. What drew me to IE in the first place (back in '96) was that it was just so much easier to develop for than Netscape; when I saw IE3, I immediately dropped Netscape and have never used another browser since (despite a very brief flirtation with Firefox). It's also the reason most intranet sites are written for IE - why spend loads of time and money on cross-browser compatibility when you can control which browser your users have? Despite recent criticism, for a long time IE was light years ahead of Netscape in terms of standards support (DHTML, XML, CSS, and so on), but then things just died off after IE6...

So, now we know that IE7 will have much improved security features, and improved standards support; we know that they will maintain backwards compatibility for the sake of all those websites out there that depend on IE's quirks to function (it will be a different story under "Longhorn", though).

If my reckoning's right, I believe that IE7 will have:

• UI enhancements; they've made it clear that adding tabs was not an easy addition to IE, so perhaps they've completely re-written the shell - unlikely, but it's possible that the "Longhorn" browser has been backported to XP, and utilizes the existing IE rendering engine, which is where the backwards compatibility would come in. So worse case scenario is tabbed browsing and a new security options page in the UI;
• It may even have portions of, or at least hooks into (to provide an upgrade path), "Avalon" code; remember that "Avalon" will be available on XP - "Avalon" utilises XAML, and a means to render this is required sooner or later on XP;
• Anti-spyware (based on their new Anti-Spyware app) and anti-phishing security features;
• Developer-friendly standards support.