For those that do any web development, you’ll be interested to know that the IE Team has released beta 3 of the IE Developer Toolbar. From what I’ve seen, this looks like an impressive release. This is well worth the download and has saved me a fair bit of time in the past.
For those of you that are interested, IE7 has been released. After following the progress of the next generation of IE since March of last year, I’ve got to say, I’m really excited to see it go public. The only real surprise for me with this announcement is that many expected the Mozilla Foundation to release Firefox 2.0 prior to Internet Explorer’s big release, yet no word from them. I’m wondering if there were more issues in the RC2 release that delayed the launch.
It’s good to know that the security and compatibility issue of the older versions of IE can now fade away into the past (where they belong).
As IE7 approaches release, the IE team has released a detailed list of the 200+ CSS changes that will appear in the final release. If you do any web development, this is a great time to read the list and audit the CSS that your sites use. IE7 breaks many of the old hacks used to work around the bugs in previous versions, so careful attention will be needed to ensure everything keeps working and looking as intended.
IE7 is a major step forward, and all web developers owe the IE team a ‘thanks’ for being so transparent in this process and making detailed change lists such as this one available.
Microsoft has announced the naming of the Windows Vista edition of IE. Internet Explorer 7+ will be the name used to refer to the Vista edition, while 7 (minus the plus) will be used to reference the non-Vista edition. While the name has been changed for Vista, this seems to mostly be about marketing (or communication) as the User-Agent for both edition will contain “MSIE 7.0;” – no plus.
Also detailed, are the features that won’t make it to the XP edition of 7, they are as follows:
- Protected Mode
- Parental Controls
- Improved Network Diagnostics
