Today Bill Gates announced IE7 at the RSA conference, and my manager Dean Hachamovitch, GM of the IE team, followed up with a post on the IEBlog.
Both the announcement and the post are short on details, but they cover the main points we're ready to share:
- Internet Explorer 7.0 (a full version upgrade)
- Beta in the summer
- Available for XP SP2
Reaction from the blogosphere, the webdev community, Slashdot, and Firefox supporters has been pretty much as I expected. Lots of webdevs want their usual list of standards supported, lots of other people want their usual list of features supported (with tabbed browsing first), the usual doubts that we'll be able to pull it off, etc. Since we're so light on details, speculation about what is in (or out) of IE7 is all over the map.
The industry press and pundits have been speculating and concluding about Microsoft is going to do about Firefox, security, etc., for such a long time, it's been rather interesting watching the various reactions. I learned long ago not to believe everything I read in the press. My relatively short time on the IE team has made me more skeptical of the press than ever before. The press seems to only rarely let a story go without adding their own particular spin.
For example, CNET's article emphasizes what they term Microsoft's "reversal" of our "long standing policy". IMHO, a policy is only a policy if you do it more than once. IE has been only updated once since that policy was announced, when we released IE in XPSP2.
Stay tuned for more on IE7.
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