Internet Explorer 7 – The Empire Strikes Back
It was very much wanted but no one expected it to appear like this. Looks like a direct result of the Firefox effect on the Microsoft’s strategy as the software giant woke up and noticed that people have started moving on to a better browser (or browsers if we consider Opera Users). In a major change in their strategy for the upcoming software releases, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced at the RSA Conference in San Francisco that they would be releasing Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP Service Pack 2 customers.
This new release would be based on the Internet Explorer modifications which were delivered by the company through SP2 of the Windows XP version. It is expected to come with new anti-phishing, anti-spyware, and anti-virus safeguards as per the official statement. However, the company has not given out any release date. Maybe, they noticed how they end up delaying software releases after promising a fixed date.
More information was released by the developers of the Internet Explorer browser on the Internet Explorer Blog. The official word on this change of strategy looks like this:
Why? Because we listened to customers, analysts, and business partners. We heard a clear message: “Yes, XP SP2 makes the situation better. We want more, sooner. We want security on top of the compatibility and extensibility IE gives us, and we want it on XP. Microsoft, show us your commitment.â€
I think of today’s announcement as a clear statement back to our customers: “Hey, Microsoft heard you. We’re committing.â€
Why are we talking about it today? Because our customers and partners have asked us, with increasing urgency, what our plans are. We want to convey our intentions to our customers and partners clearly and in a timely way.
In other words, Microsoft wants us to believe that they finally heard their corporate customers that Internet Explorer needed a major update, which was more secure and perhaps more standard compliant. On the other hand, maybe, they read the letter from Hakon Wium Lie, CTO, Opera Software, which said some real nice things about the company and its policies.
Robert Scoble, a celebrity blogger on Microsoft’s payroll actually answered that letter. His words:
I invite Hakon to watch Channel 9 too. In about a week we have an interview with Scott Guthrie, who heads up the IIS and ASP.NET teams. I gave Scott crap about just this problem in that interview and he says that they are working hard to fix it in IIS 7.0 and the next version of ASP.NET. Not exactly the answer that Lie will want to hear, but demonstrates that we are working to fix this problem company-wide (the Web teams here rely heavily on ASP.NET and IIS to generate their HTML and CSS).
Check out more information on Internet Explorer 7
Sushubh Mittal is the Technical Consultant for Search Engine Journal and Blogs at TechWhack and Software Journal.
