Future of IE 7 = A long, slow, well-overdue death

Jose Francisco has written a lengthy article for XPSource this week, summarising the main points to come out of a recent MS-organised online chat that centred around IE7.

And it's a real hoot.

You've really gotta love the way these MS guys think, ignoring the bleeding obvious, trying to drum up excitement about things the rest of us are all well & truly used to by now, and just generally living in their own little fantasy land. They do their best to assume a position of superiority over other browsers by weaving a spell of quasi-mystery and big expectations, which is really most amusing to read.

The main "facts" (quote unquote) about the upcoming IE7 have already done the rounds of the web, with nothing new here. In short, IE7 will drop ActiveX support, will include an anti-phishing tool, won't work on Windows 2000 and will have tabbed browsing. It will also be dropping Java from its installation bundle (but, I'm assuming, will still support it), won't have custom skins or styling, will not be optional in Win Vista, will not work at all on a Mac, and will no longer include the planned download manager, because, the developers hasten to add:

“It is not “too hard”, we just are not able to implement a download manager with the level of high quality that we want in the timeframe of this release.”

In other words, it's too hard for them.

(Firefox, on the other hand, has been including an excellent, inbuilt download manager since the very early days, plus there are over 30 individual extensions available that add additional tools for this task and/or allow Firefox to interface with other popular 3rd-party download managers, such as wget, Download Accelerator Plus, GetRight, and the online download app, DownloadStudio).

The only truly interesting comment from the article was that there's a potential new UI to be unveiled in the next IE7 beta. Maybe. (Oooo -- the mystery! The excitement!)

Hey, did you know that Firefox has hundreds of themes, UI enhancements and customisable bits & bobs you can use right now?

Heh. ;)

Some other choice quotes:

Jessep Bangham:
"All in all, there will always be people who prefer certain browsers (there are still hundreds of thousands of people who choose AOL) but we are sure that by the time of release we will have a far more feature rich application than Firefox can offer."

So let's get this straight: They're not going to include a download manager, nor themes, nor a modifiable UI, yet it's still going to be "more feature rich application than Firefox". Oh man, you gotta love it.

And, talking about the threat of Firefox...

Dave Massey:
"Dude, They may have that number of downloads but that is very different from having that number of users. Recent stats actually show Firefox growth has slowed and is even declining. We’re looking forward to supplying a great user experience in IE7."

Y'know, there are a heap of stats around for people to select from, and I guess if they look hard enough, those MS folk will probably find something to support their claims. Unfortunately for them, however, I can also find many stats to support the opposing claim that, in fact, Firefox usage is still increasing.

So, which stats will you listen to? Well, I can answer that one -- none of them. Because you're already using Firefox, and don't need any prickly statistics to tell you just how good it really is, do you now? ;)