Kevin Dente's Blog

# re: IE7 - hard to be excited@ Thursday, February 17, 2005 1:20 AM

Wait until you see it. You might change your mind.

Robert Scoble

# re: IE7 - hard to be excited@ Thursday, February 17, 2005 1:56 AM

Robert,
I hope you're right - I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.

Kevin Dente

# re: IE7 - hard to be excited@ Thursday, February 17, 2005 7:52 AM

I'll use whatever browser I believe is best. For me that was IE, now it's Firefox. I'll certainly be trying the beta's of IE :)

One thing that has annoyed me is Gate's latest:

"In fact, we just announced that we'll have a new version of the browser so we're innovating very rapidly there and its our commitment to have the best. "

I can't stand how often Microsoft come out with the innovation line when. Don't get me wrong, I really do like most MS products especially Windows but it's rare they innovate. Mostly they simplify and integrate which could perhaps be classed as innovation of usability but not on features.

Before they "innovate" with IE7 they have to first play catch up on:

Tabbed browsing, RSS bookmarks, better PNG and CSS standards support.

And before somebody says Average Joe doesn't need these features I'll remind them Average Joe is probably still using IE6.. They want the Firefox userbase back they'll have to give them the features they have plus a little extra to be worth the switch. Just like Firefox did to IE6 users.

[)

Damien Guard

# re: IE7 - hard to be excited@ Thursday, February 17, 2005 1:47 PM

Damien,
I've heard the "MS doesn't innovate" argument before, but I don't buy it. They do innovate. Take development platforms, for example (which is their strongest suite, in my opinion). When most people were doing CGI, they created ASP. When the Java world was using servlets, MS created ASP.NET (still the best web development platform out there). Yes, they innovate.

What annoys me is when they claim to be responding to what the users want. Users have been clamoring for a better browser for ages, and MS did nothing. Firefox gave that desire an outlet, and now MS is worried. I fully believe that if Firefox was never created, we'd be stuck with IE6 for several more years. It's the classic example of why monopoly is bad and competition is good.

BTW, although I love Firefox, I don't think it's dazzlingly innovative. Firefox didn't invent tabbed browsing. RSS bookmarks are worthless, as far as I'm concerned. Better standards support is an incremental improvement, for sure, but nothing more. I don't need radical innovation, necessarily, I just want an ever-improving web browsing experience. If MS offers me that in IE7, I'll look at it, for sure (Firefox has plenty of annoyances, and still crashes too often - but then, so does IE).

Kevin Dente

# re: IE7 - hard to be excited@ Friday, February 18, 2005 1:43 AM

One big thing I've learned to love about Firefox is the simple extensibility model. MS Extensibility for IE will probably always involve installing something that may or may not trash my system and can't be uninstalled. Firefox extensibility is really simple, and I've gotten hooked on all the cool extensions.

Jon Galloway

# re: IE7 - hard to be excited@ Friday, February 18, 2005 3:06 PM

Jon,
Yes, the extensibility model in Firefox is fantastic. I just wish it was easier to develop against. The documentation sucks, the tools suck, the whole developer experience around extensions pretty much just sucks. I got some basic stuff working, but it was a royal pain, and figuring out how to do things inside the object model takes a lot of work.

Kevin Dente