We’ve been stuck in a time warp with IE6 for yonks, the only updates have been to fix a few of the gazillion fucking security holes in the web browser-slash-windows browser. IE7 will probably be released as part of Longhorn, M$’s latest attempt at a secure stable OS, and as well as better security (security-focused release they claim, the browser is ‘divorced’ from windows which was one of the biggest security problems with previous IE versions) they have promised what web developers have been crying for, better support for web standards.
In a blog entry last week Chris Wilson promised to address many of the major CSS consistency problems and also to support the alpha channel in PNG images. Better late than never I suppose.
Contrary to what i’ve heard before IE7 will also work on XP SP2 (there’s going to be an SP3 by the way) and it will be released before Longhorn (first Beta will be this summer) although it seems MS can’t even make up their mind on that as they previously announced that there would be no standalone version of IE7 before a Longhorn release*. They are not even sure how they will update IE on other systems, whether it will be small add-ons or as part of a service pack release.
*I wonder if MS under estimated the growth of Firefox … latest firgures indicate over 46 million people have downloaded Firefox! It might be a reason for the earlier release. Either way IE7 will be doing the same thing on my PC as IE6 is doing now, gathering dust … virtual dust.
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