Web developers around the world groan

So we’re going to get a new version of IE before Longhorn - IE6 SP3 IE7. To misappropriate a Bill Hicks line, great, now there’s another version of IE I won’t be using.

I can just imagine the scenes at Redmond -

Steve: Loads of home users are ditching Explorer ‘cos it’s so buggy and insecure, and now some of the corporates are talking about switching to Firefox too. We need to make it look as though we’re not stagnating until Longhorn!

Bill: You’re right, we’ve got to combat all the bad publicity that we’re attracting now the mainstream media is picking up on how crap our products are… Hmmm, so how can we make it look like we give two shits about our end users?

Steve: Well, we could cobble together a few security patches for IE and release them as SP3…

Bill: No, we’ll call at IE7! Guaranteed good publicity, and it’ll be weeks before anyone twigs that it’s just a bug fix for a four year old browser!

Steve: Brilliant!

Well, maybe I’m just being too cynical, but I’d be amazed if IE7 actually introduced any major rendering improvements over IE6, such as support for png alpha transparency and CSS2.1. I suspect its CSS support will either remain unchanged, or there will be a few minor improvements that introduce a slew of new bugs for us to deal with. Still, at least it’ll give the web design bloggers something to do, coming up with yet more hacks to workaround yet another buggy Mircosoft browser.

As for your average, non-developer user, I can’t see it really improving on Firefox in terms of features, security and usability.

On a related note, the Register published a great little rant about MS’s attitude to interoperability by Hakon Lie a few days ago.

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