Microsoft is starting to release details of what people can expect from Internet Explorer 7. After losing serious market share to the Firefox web browser, Microsoft changed their mind about releasing another IE before the next Windows (Longhorn) is released. Up until recently they didn’t give us much in the way of details, but that is slowly changing. The latest word from the IE blog is that IE7 will be basically IE6 with it’s myriad CSS bugs fixed, proper PNG image support and perhaps some limited CSS2.1/3 support added into the mix. It will also have updated security compared to IE6 SP2, but it seems that it still won’t be available on anything but Windows XP SP2 or above. Oh and they are probably adding tabbed browsing as well.

This is great news, even though I am not a fan of IE, and won’t be using IE7, the fact that I don’t have to use IE CSS hacks to get pages to display properly in IE is very welcome news. My only question is: How will pages that include workarounds for problems like the IE box model hack render in IE7? will we have to update all these pages to keep the pages consistent appearance wise?

However good this news is, I’ll continue to insist my clients use Firefox wherever possible because the new IE will still have ActiveX (the main cause of IE’s abysmal security record), will still be built into the Operating System and does not have anything like Firefox’s extensions available. I’ve become addicted to about 15 of Firefox’s extensions and couldn’t imagine not having them. For web developers, the extras that the extensions provide quickly become indispensable. Mostly though, I’ll continue to insist that my clients use Firefox because since they all have been, I’ve not been called out to fix any Virus or Spyware problems on their PC’s. To me that is the ultimate proof of the best browser. As the saying goes: “Money talks bull$… walks”.

This article was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 7:11 pm