Internet Explorer 7 is on its way!

What an announcement! Actually I don't think it would be much news at all if it wouldn't be for the attention browsers have been getting of late. I don't remember anything special about IE 5 or 6 coming out, but of course I wasn't paying any attention then. Really the Mozilla folks have brought attention to the browser sector. If you've read here you may know that I prefer Firefox. However, a new version of IE would certainly be good.

The good things would be (hopefully): better security, option to enable tabbed browsing and perhaps kill ActiveX. Of course the killing of ActiveX is something I don't expect to happen. Maybe it shouldn't. But there is a lot of problems with the fact that it is integrated and perhaps it would be better without it.

An issue I see is that this release is being developed primarily for users of WinXP SP2. The Windows 2000 support sounded a little shaky. I use Win2k and wouldn't want to have to upgrade my OS to upgrade my browser (though I don't actually use it much). So...Is IE7 going to be properly backwards compatible? Also... this is "small potatoes" but to quote the IEBlog: "This new release will build on the work we did in Windows XP SP2 and (among other things) go further to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software". Defense is alright but invulnerability would be preferable.

With the beta coming this summer we'll have a chance to try it out.