Microsoft’s updated browser is released next week, and will be distributed via automatic update from November 1st.
It is three years late. Here’s the release history:
- Version 1.0 August 1995
- Version 2.0 November 1995
- Version 3.0 August 1996
- Version 4.0 September 1997
- Version 5.0 March 1999
- Version 6.0 August 2001
On a (reasonable) two year release cycle, we should have had version 7.0 in 2003. Let me add that version 6.0 was really a disappointment; more like version 5.1 in some ways. Microsoft won the browser wars, then stalled the progress of web standards for five years. It was the growing popularity of Firefox, released in November 2004, that persuaded Microsoft to restart development. There would in any case have been some sort of update in Windows Vista; but without the open source competition I doubt it would have amounted to much.
The history leaves a bad taste and makes it hard to enthuse about IE7. Nevertheless, it is a badly-needed update. I’m inclined to leave the blow-by-blow comparison with Firefox to others.
The one piece I can enthuse about is the centralized RSS store that comes as part of IE. This makes a lot of sense and I’m looking forward to it.
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