It was announced yesterday that Internet Explorer 7 will be coming in the fourth quarter of this year, and will be pushed out as a critical update for Windows XP users. This is pretty good news, as it means that the bulk of Internet Explorer users will be upgraded to the much-improved browser automatically, and IE6 marketshare will quickly drop.
The main reason this is a good thing is that IE7 fixes a whole lot of CSS bugs, and when creating web sites, one will no longer have to worry so much about catering to these bugs and providing workarounds. This is because IE7 closely follows web standards, and attempts to be a legitimate player in the web browser market in this regard. At the same time, it’s going to break a lot of web sites that unaware developers created which rely on proprietary IE6 ‘features’.
It will be interesting to watch this all unfold.
Internet Explorer, including version 7, has never been known for its adherence to web standards.
Compare several browsers’ support for standards at Web Devout:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.php
How do you justify the claim that IE7 “closely follows web standards”? Sure, IE7 follows them closer than IE6, but that’s not saying much.
Perhaps ‘closely’ was a bit generous. You have to give them credit for at least trying this time.