In an announcement today Bill Gates announced that there will be a new version of Internet Explorer after all – IE7 will be out in a beta version this summer.
In the IE blog there is of course much positive to say about this – but just how much can we expect from this update? Will we get what is needed – updated standards support and png support – or is this just one of those “don’t leave us, we’ll have something better soon”-announcements? It’s not the first time we’ve heard those, it that’s the case.
What does the announcement say about it?
Building on those advancements, Gates announced Internet Explorer 7.0, designed to add new levels of security to Windows XP SP2 while maintaining the level of extensibility and compatibility that customers have come to expect. Internet Explorer 7.0 will also provide even stronger defenses against phishing, malicious software and spyware. The beta release is scheduled to be available this summer.
Not much. Add new levels of security? OK, it’s needed, but what more? “Compability” – that may not sound as good as we’d first believe: Compatible with what? Earlier statements from MS staff tells us that one reason IE hasn’t been updated to support the standards, is because the compability with previous versions – and solutions that build on the non standard functions and implementations of those. Supporting the standards would easily break those solutions, in addition to that web pages will break, too. (Gee, how bad. The web designers of those sites need to be updated anyway.) Now, if that’s the kind of compability we can expect, we might not keep our hopes too high of a better rendering engine.
However – this is not going to happen until summer, at earliest, and that’s with a beta version. The finished version will be available – when? Until then – and maybe/probably after then – there are better and more secure alternatives. Such as Opera (and Firefox and Safari and…) MS has felt the pressure to do something about their browser because of these increasingly popular alternatives. Keep up that pressure to make MS do the right thing with their browser; install and use one of the alternatives. Nothing prevents you from going back to IE should you wish to at a later stage, when – hopefully – IE does supportthe standards too.
