The topic title is some amusing quote from the Microsoft Windows XP Expert Zone newsgroups. Another one is:
there u will find the sources u need,this is annoying.Very Intresting indeed.belive me these people look serious. :),if this is true Microsoft is making BIG HIT!
Anyway, it seems Internet Explorer 7 is actually underway. I wonder what the reason is. (Official announcement.)
What do you think it will add? I guess it will have some user interface enhancements, like tabs and perhaps an easier to use search function. Although there seems to be some activity in the CSS WG from Microsoft I do not think they will have any improvements in that area. Perhaps some little bug fixes. Some optimist might hope for PNG support.
However, I could be wrong of course. They might deploy the whole package.
Considering what they did to MSN Messenger 7 beta, I guess they'll add a tighter integration with msn search and their mp3 store.
And for Microsoft's sake: let's hope they improve the security :)
For a while there Anne, we were the secret alpha developers of IE7. That "Expert Zone" post still makes me laugh... :-)
Meanwhile smoke is coming out of my computer as people google IE7...
As long as they are not going to start googling for Internet Explorer 7 I will be fine :-)
In my pesimitic view you are too optimistic.
Ain't that just another name for "cumulative security update"?
With all the focus of the announcements being on the security upgrades of IE7, I'm actually not expecting anything more than what would amount to IE6.5. I hope I'm pleasantly surprised come Summer.
Since IE7 will of course not be a browser with even the half of the CSS support Mozilla offers, this announcement means only one thing:
We're going to need some more CSS hacks.
Why? If they don't do a thing to fix their rendering engine, which appears most likely at this stage, all the hacks that work for IE6 will still work for IE7.
I suspect they'll borrow a lot of anti-phishing features from Firefox, intergrate more with MSN and perhaps add a feed reader. I don't hope there'll be significant updates to the rendering engine, cause frankly I'm worried how well they'll be able to pull that off without breaking anything - and since they are very keen on backwards compatibility they probably won't do it anyway. And I'm afraid that IE7 will be better than Firefox, and I really don't want to switch back :)
MSFT stand to lose a lot from losing their grip on the desktop monopoly. Web apps are the devil. So the motivation is obvious: the longer they can keep users clinging to a backwater browser, the better for their business.
With that in mind, I think it's easy to predict what will happen:
My guess is that they will duplicate the way Mozilla deals with favicons. After all, favicons is what the web is about, right?
With the way Mozilla deals with favicons, do you mean supporting any type of image? I must say that in my Newsfeeds list, those without a favicon look a bit dull.
To start they could show the icon directly, instead of only showing it when you have bookmarked the page.
Anne, you're partly wrong. When you drag the explorer-icon (the one in the address-bar) to the viewport the site will reload and the icon will change to the favicon from the site. So you don't need to bookmark a site in order to display the favicon. :p