The IE Team Blog has the news that Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP has now been released and is available from the Internet Explorer home page at www.microsoft.com/windows/ie.
Apparently it isn’t available via Windows Update just yet, and it seems that they haven’t pushed it out to machines as a high priority update as I reported a while back (or at least they haven’t done so yet).
From the post:
We listened carefully to feedback from many sources (including this blog) and worked hard to deliver a safer browser that makes everyday tasks easier … IE7 also delivers a much easier browsing experience with features like tabbed browsing (especially with QuickTabs), shrink-to-fit printing, an easily customizable search box, and a new design that leaves more screen real estate for the web site you’re viewing.
From the user’s perspective, it will be interesting to see how much reaction there is to the announcement and how many ordinary users will update to IE7 (I’m guessing not many at all). If and when Microsoft deliver it as an update, we will really get to know what the average computer user thinks of Microsoft’s latest browser offering.
From the web developer standpoint, IE7 is a mixed blessing. On the good side, IE7 supports quite a lot more (but in my eyes still not good enough) CSS support and improvements which will hopefully bring things like syndication more into the public eye. On the bad side, however, many sites will break when they find that code hacks they were using to get IE6 working no longer work in IE7 and for a while, the journey may be a bit rocky.
What’s certain, though, is that the rise of alternative browsers like Firefox has forced Microsoft to play catch up, with IE7 being the first Internet Explorer release to sport standard features in Firefox and Opera like tabbed browsing. Arguably, they’ve also done some innovation in the security space, but most of the better security features will only show themselves in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
IE6 has been out since August 2001 and this has been the longest gap between releases in IE history. Will it be another 5 years until IE8? I hope not.
