The IEBlog has confirmed speculation that Microsoft is going to release an innovative new approach to web browsing called Tabs. Tabs allow a user to have several different pages open in the same browser instance rather then requiring that a user open a new instance of IE to view another site. Oh wait. Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and Safari have had tabbed browsing for a long time now. In the case of Mozilla and Opera that time is measured in years. I like the idea of a safer more featured Internet Explorer, but I hope they don’t call it “innovative” in their marketing as they appear to be just playing catch up to keep them in the same ballgame as the other modern browsers which did not have the disadvantage of having had development stopped for several years due to lack of market share competition. When you give a product away for free with your Operating System, and that product has over 94% of market share (as IE did until Firefox started reversing the trend) you don’t have much incentive to continue development and that is what caused the stagnation of IE.
