Microsoft’s recent announcement regarding the upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0’s status as an automatic and “High Priority” update should make a lot of people happy while simultaneously making a great deal of them extremely anxious.

Pushing IE7 out as an automatic, high priority update should all but guarantee a quick roll-out — much of which should occur almost overnight. Marking it as a “high priority” update (undoubtedly due to IE6’s well publicized security hole bonanza) should also help push corporate IT departments to deploy the update to their desktops and workstations as quickly as possible.

As amazing as it might sound this will be the first major update to IE since it’s release in late 2001.

What’s All The Hubbub?

What’s so great about IE7? Well, aside from the incredibly important security fixes, IE7 adds support for the latest web standards as well is three or four important features (in our opinion at least):

• True PNG graphics support with full alpha channel transparency.
• Built in RSS feed handling capabilities.
• Improved CSS level 2 support (and fixes to erroneous CSS handling in general).
• The XMLHTTP object (think AJAX) is now a native scripting object which makes it available even if users have ActiveX support disabled, effectively decoupling IE’s ActiveX requirement for AJAX interfaces. This should have never been an ActiveX control to begin with.

That’s pretty much it.

The MSDN site lists a few other things but they aren’t of any real relevance (tabbed browsing is cool but not nearly as important as proper CSS2 support). All of this could have been addressed with a point release 2 years ago, but I digress.

IE6’s PNG support (or lack thereof) has been the bane of many a web developer’s existence. Having true alpha transparency support will create some really interesting design opportunities. Soft layered shadows and composited/layered transparent images without cludgy ActiveX hacks…finally! The same goes for CSS level 2 support. It was a long time coming.

It’s our opinion that the built-in RSS support cannot be underestimated. Like it or not, RSS is extremely handy for keeping up with your favorite websites, news, and blogs but it still has its feet firmly planted in the geek and blogging realm. Adding RSS support to IE7 should certainly help nudge it into the Web’s mainstream user base.

Intended Consequences

It’s important to realize that all of these “great” things are really just great because of IE’s ubiquity. Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera have had all these features for years now along with timely and relevant security updates and additions to functionality (functionality we didn’t have to wait 5 years for). It’s pretty obvious that IE’s ubiquity can be traced back to the fact that it’s bundled with every Windows operating system under the sun, making IE’s dominance something that will most likely continue well into the future. Love it or hate it.

Not So Fast!

There have been a couple of articles recently about the pitfalls of pushing a browser out so fast and furious. Things like “what if there are bugs in our web applications or bugs in IE7 that stop our application from functioning properly?” The answer is that IE7 has been available in beta form for several months and you should be testing your software against it. I know that’s easier said than done but replacing a broken and insecure browser that’s built on 5 year-old technology, as quickly as possible, has to be more important. It just has to be.

Back To Reality

We understand, realistically, it will still take some time to flush the last vestiges of IE6 out of the cluttered back-allies and clogged tubes of the Interweb but Microsoft has made the right call on this one.

The sooner we get to a point that we, as developers and designers, can look back and laugh at all this the better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Technology, Design, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.