Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

According a blog entry on an IE developers site (here, at the time I am writing this it wont load, its hosted on msdn and with the publicity the related stories have generated it probably is getting more than 2 simultaneous requests right now) the new IE 7 will have better support for something totally crazy called "standards". And these will be actual W3C standards rather than what Microsoft traditionally calls a standard. Some of these crazy standards are called things like "CSS".

IE7 will also get PNG support and guess what MS people, TABBED BROWSING. I have been saying for years thats one of the coolest things about Opera/Konq/Moz/FF and I get static back from some of my MS friends. It really changes the way you use a browser once you adopt it and makes it much easier to multi-task-browse. Yes you can alt-tab or whatever the hell and open 17 different windows and have all that across your task bar (or unix style have 17 different x windows open) but thats inefficient, you dont have things as organized (the little "tabs" across the top identifying each, and you cant get back and forth as quickly. Yes you can still just use the keyboard to hop around, open new tabs, etc. I cant believe people argue about the usefulness of tabbed browsing, but hey, they are MS people I guess.

Anyway, hopefully it takes a long damn time for IE7 to make it to market and FF and others continue to pick up market share. Seems like a shame for browsers that "innovated" (strange use of the word) to use "standards" to get crushed again after making so much headway, but it could happen. I personally wont use IE7 for a variety of reasons beyond just the actual features of the browser (security, ms centric, etc) but the mainstream inertia probably will lead most people back that direction. The longer it takes to get out the more people will learn and learn to love, the alternatives.   Microsoft discloses some IE 7 plans