Apparently big Bill has had a change of heart, not that long ago he practically swore there would be no new feature updates to Internet Explorer until the next Windows is released (dubbed Longhorn, or Longwait by some and not due out till late 2006 or early 2007.) He has changed his tune and indicated that a beta of IE7 will be out this summer.
Bill claims that the reason is security, analysts credited the growing popularity of the Firefox web browser (which has a ton of features that IE does not, and a much better security record to boot) as the reason for Microsoft’s change of heart. The update will only run on PC’s with Windows XP service pack 2, so anyone with 2000 or 98/ME should not get excited. I’m hoping that all the smart folk are using Firefox by then, and anyone that isn’t deserves what they get. It should be noted that if they really were updating IE only to improve security, then there is no reason to only update IE for XP SP2 users, there are still a large number of people using older versions of Windows. That fact alone indicates this is more about countering Firefox and their own bad security record then it is about helping their customers.
See Cnet for all the details.
