IE7 – is it really ‘all that’?

The geek fraternity was gifted with a new offering from the grand wizards of Redmond this week in the form of the punchily named Internet Explorer 7 Public Beta 2, so we have to ask ‘Is it really all that’?

Err… no.

It looks nicer than IE6 - a bit more pared down, a bit cleaner, a bit more usable. Mostly because it looks like a cross between Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
It’s got tabbed browsing - a bit like Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
It handles RSS feeds - a bit like Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
It’s got a quick search bar with multiple search engines - a bit like Firefox.
It fixes a lot of rendering bugs that were in prior versions, so it renders… a bit like Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

Big whoop, you might say. So what makes it so special?

Actually, nothing. It’s got a few nice touches, like the Expose-esque [CTRL + Q] snaphot view, but nothing that’s going to cause any Firefox users to jump back to the good ship Redmond.

So why the fuss?

Well, we humble artisans who spend our days crafting fine XHTML and CSS now have a problem to face - how to acomodate the new browser version when it reaches full public release candidate status whilst leaving our carefully constructed “work-arounds” in place that make older versions of the browser behave like a civilised member of society.

At present I’m inclined to say “Meh. It’s still in Beta - come bother me when it gets to RC1″, but the techno-monkey in me is also itching to get in there and have a play about and figure out what’s still broken.

Actually, that last sentence sums it up for me. I see a new version of the most widely used web browser from the largest software company on the planet hove into view on the horizon, and I don’t think “I wonder what’s new”, I’m too busy thinking “I wonder what’s still broken“.

Microsoft may be big, and they may have a dominating market share, but they aren’t as agile or seemingly as concerned with a rounded, standards-compliant piece of software as the young turks at the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, or even their arch-nemesis Apple.

When IE renders web pages properly, I’ll be interested.

When I don’t have to worry about “getting it to work in IE”, I’ll be over the moon.

And when IE isn’t hideously out-paced and out-performed by smaller, free, non-proprietary software, I’ll be amazed.

And I strongly suspect that by that point I’ll have a pension book, and possibly a wizard-like beard down to my knees.

• Friday 3rd February
• Posted by Andy Hawkes