The rumour mill is ticking, the leaks are leaking and /. is in a Microsoft frenzy over the coming soon IE 7 beta story from Mary Jo Foley, which originally broke on March 3 in the Ziff Davis private $99/month Microsoft Watch newsletter and now an edited version is available publically. The article details information about IE 7.0 reportedly gathered from “Microsoft Key Partners” like:

…. we can expect 32 bit PNG support, native IDN support, new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE and, of course, tabbed browsing. The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator.

But is there anything new or unexpected here? Not really. They have to support png. Tabbed browsing is hot on Firefox so they need to add that to be competitive on that front. What about the RSS aggregator? No surprise there either. Still, they don’t seem to be talking about dropping ActiveX (which won’t happen any time soon) or better CSS support, which are the major inadequacies that miffs many /. commenters. The IE7 blog, through Chris Wilson, has addressed the CSS issue in some detail:

Additionally, with every subsequent major release of IE, we have expanded and improved our implementation of web standards, particularly CSS and HTML. When we shipped IE 6.0, we finally fully supported CSS 1, and had some pieces of CSS2 implemented as well … We know we have a lot more work to do in addressing our consistency issues with CSS and furthering our coverage of these standards. Expect to see more detail on our plans in IE7 in the future.

This tells me that there are definitely plans to update and upgrade the CSS support. Will it be to the extent that webmasters and developers hope for? Doubtful. From a webmaster/developer perspective, we don’t really care what the browsers do outside the playing field — the active browsing window — as long as it’s not too gaudy, stealing too much screen real estate, and allows at least some form of customization; we just want our sites to look the same or at least closed to the same in the major browsers without a ton of coding gymnastics. If Microsoft just focuses on these goals with whatever enhanced support for CSS they offer, then the majority of people will be happy, except for the M$ haters who will never be happy, even if Microsoft ships IE7.0 with free money attached.

I’m looking forward to the first IE 7 public beta which is expected to be out in a couple months. The bottom line is 75% of the traffic to our sites are still using IE 7 so 75% of my browser effort and interest from a webmaster standpoint is in learning the most I can about IE. Personally, I still continue using IE about 65% of the time, Firefox 30% and 5% to other browsers. All criticism and personal bias aside, when people ask what’s my favorite browser is my response is: whatever the most people are using that visit my website. That’s at least one thing that I would bet won’t be changing any time soon.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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