Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) fought against Netscape for dominance in the “browser wars” of the mid 1990s, around 1998 it became clear that IE was the winner. Internet Explorer 5.0, released in March 1999, built upon the success of past versions. While Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0 (both released in roughly 15 month windows), added standards support and fixed various rendering bugs they also introduced others (and in some cases re-introduced previously fixed ones). With that said however IE 6.0 was still ahead of the pack – it had virtually complete CSS1 support and had incomplete (and often buggy) CSS2 support. However the development stood still for years, and with it progress.

The past year or so has seen a lot of articles written advocating the decline of Microsoft Internet Explorer’s market share. The actual numbers vary according to which sites (and hence more importantly what user demographics) this data is gathered from; you’ll typically find figures ranging from 77% to 86%. One of the main drives behind the “evangelism” of Firefox, the only true competitor IE has today, was its support for W3C standards. While the security, clean UI, and extensibility are used to market it to end-users, the web-development community rallied around it for merely selfish reasons… and it seems to have paid off.

With the growing popularity of Firefox, Microsoft announced in July 2004 that it would be releasing a standalone version of IE 7 and wouldn’t be waiting to release the browser until Windows Vista/Longhorn had been released. While the IE Blog launched to a lot of initial criticism over its lack of content (posts detailing IE 6.0 tips or “why I love windows” weren’t quite what most were looking for), they showed a willingness to state things as they were in face of the overwhelming response they received.


For Users

IE 7’s main focus is on User Interface improvements and security. The anti-phishing system (seemingly similar to what was recently implemented in netscape 8) is sure to set people’s minds at ease, as well as other security enhancements (though low rights mode as of now is Vista/Longhorn only). With IE 7 the browser now supports tabbed browsing, and the team has admitted that beta 1 did not include a lot of basic UI features that will be added later. There’s bound to be a fairly strong marketing campaign with the advent of IE 7 to hype up these features – this with the automatic windows updates most XP users use should help create a fairly strong adoption rate amongst those who do use it.

For Web Developers

While complete CSS 2 (or soon to be 2.1) is stated to be a platform goal, IE7 is “making progress against that” which implies that full support may not take place until a later release. Beta 2 will include fixes to many of the worst CSS bugs that currently plague IE 6.0x (they’ve updated to show a few more fixes). It’s reasonable to assume that more rendering fixes and additions will be added before the final release, especially with the increased openness of the development team in creating a joint task force with the Web Standards Project (WaSP) (some fruits are coming out this partnership already). While there is sure to be a learning curve as to the new limits of the browser, as well inevitably (as with any browser release) some unique bugs of its own, IE7 will create much cleaner CSS based layouts.

For developers of internal sites (intranet only, etc) the release of IE 7 is sure to make life a lot easier. The vast majority of workstation PCs on campus run Windows XP SP2 – the only non-server OS besides Vista/Longhorn that has confirmed support for the browser at the moment. Given the security improvements, if testing doesn’t show applications breaking policy driven updates of IE 6 to 7 are highly likely to take place. At this point (especially if there are not many anticipated remote users) it is safe to assume that windows clients will be using either IE7 or a client such as Firefox or Opera which should render similarly.

For those on external sites, it isn’t as rosy a picture. While, once adapted, development for IE 7 should be much easier, as noted earlier the only supported operating system’s are Windows XP SP2, Server 2003 SP1, and the as of now in beta Vista/Longhorn. In essence supporting IE 7 shouldn’t be too much different than other modern browsers. The catch is with a significant proportion of the population physically incapable of upgrading (not to mention those who just don’t care or know how) it will be yet another version of IE to support and potentially another set of conditional comments to work around.

For IT Staff

Again a learning curve followed by anticipated benefits – the enhanced security features should ease fears of those that cannot advocate leaving the IE platform due to local applications breaking due to lack of Active X support or other factors. In the future sites made for IE 7 (should) render closer to other popular browsers which may in the long term reduce issues users have attempting to use local applications in other browsers. Applications may seem themselves updated to work in more standards compliant manners with a major release (and the demographic share) of an IE 7 release as opposed to Firefox, Opera, Safari etc – for no other reason than that their major clients are now likely to want to upgrade from IE 6.0x themselves.

Official Sources