Bill Gates at the RSA 2005 Keynote announced that this summer we would see a beta version of a new completely rewritten Internet Explorer. What made Bill and the whole Microsoft family to decide to build a new version of IE before Longhorn? What features and security improvements are we going to see you may ask. Below I outline some of the new things I know of today that will be available in IE7.
Does Microsoft have a vision of having the world’s most popular browser still? Yes and so that’s why we are seeing a new version even before Longhorn is to be released. This new version will be on top of Firefox 1.0 and will be better then Firefox if the Mozilla Foundation does not stay ahead of features and what not
So what kind of new features are we seeing in this new version of Internet Explorer?
• Full CSS2 Support
• Tabbed Browsing
• Anti-Fishing Technologies
• Full PNG24 Support including Alpha Transparency
• Improved security on top of Windows XP SP2 Security Improvements
Bill said we are not releasing IE7 until Longhorn comes out
Yep he did say that but when you look at IE’s market share Bill said “Oh My IE is dropping more then I thought”. At the RSA 2005 Keynote Bill thought he would change his policy on Internet Explorer because like we all know IE6 is old, buggy, US Government even said not to use IE and all the complaining on the IE Team blog made Bill under pressure so that’s most likely why Bill said “We are changing our plans for IE7”.
Was Bill’s decision to release IE7 before Longhorn a good idea? - Most definitely. We have been waiting for over 8 years for PNG24 Transparency in IE4.
My list of things Microsoft has fixed since Windows XP SP2
• Automatic ActiveX Download blocking
• Security
My list of things Microsoft is going fix in Internet Explorer 7
• PNG24 Alpha Transparency
• 95% better Standards Support
How can I predict IE7 has better standards support? Well currently all I use for Web Design/Development is Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the code it generates works wonders in both Firefox and Internet Explorer so I can see Microsoft is trying to improve on the standards support by a great deal.
Boy I am so waiting for this IE7. When is it going to be released?
This summer we will see Beta 1 of Internet Explorer 7. Keep up to date with the release over at the IE Team’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/
