So, I've given quite a bit of thought to browsers lately. I do not like Firefox much, but by the same token, I do not hold blame against those that do. It is not a bad browser, it just irks me in some of its behavior. That being said, I am somewhat excited about IE 7.0 and wanted to discuss the future of IE as I see it, both the rumors, and things I may decide to believe as being true. Steve, when you read this, send me a new build of the beta please ;)

Why a new version of IE?

There are many reasons for this. Many people want more features, many people just want more security. As for security, when you consider the number of people attempting to exploit IE, I think the IE version after the release of XP SP2/ Windows 2003 SP1 is more secure than people give it credit for. Is it still a problem? Without doubt. More security only becomes a bad thing once something becomes so encoumbered in behavioral changes and lack of user friendliness that it is no longer usable. When does this flip happen between the security versus usability? I think that is something that each individual user has to decide for themselves...though alot of people will lower their security settings to keep from having to click OK too often, and to those people I say, “You do not deserve to have a computer anyhow, please take it back to BestBuy and cancel your AOL account. Thank You.”

Personally, as far as the security issue is concerned, I disagree with Microsoft's decisions on making IE 7.0. To me, the next solution in releasing a new Internet Explorer is...Releasing a *NEW* Internet Explorer. Same with Windows. We get these promises of rewritten code that is going to be more secure. This has never happened. Take many of the *core* NT 4 files and compare the hex code to that of many of the core XP files. Same with Internet Explorer. To me, a new Internet Explorer means drop the old code, archive it, depricate it and write Bob a new version in C#. Managed code is inherently more secure that native code, and for those too hard headed to believe that, close the browser, I don't like you anyhow.

The second reason for a new version of IE is for new features. I agree IE has been static along time, but, I also think that a stable feature set that has been tested and is secure is better than adding new features often that add new opportunities for vulnerabilities. I did however really enjoy the addition of both the pop up blocker and the add on manager in the last iteration of IE. This came along with the security additions that allowed you as the user to decide if you wanted to install a specific plug in or not. Much better than things just POOF and happening before, and no add in manager to take them back out. Registry anyone? The one thing that I think I would like to have seen done alittle differently with the whole 'This thingie or that thingie needs to be installed for this page to work better'. Once you close the little alert drop down part for the page, it should not display again until you ask it too, or you browse to another domain. Yes, I know from the last 732 times you told me that this site wants Flash, I don't want to install Flash...

Ok, I think we should also look at some of the items people would like to see added to Internet Explorer.

1. Tabbed Browsing. To me tabbed browsing is not something I would even care to see, but it is a popular enough item that it should be added.

2. Support for IDN domain names. This is already in IE 6 listed as UTF-8, but it is off by default. If they want to turn this on, I hope they implement something obvious when someone is using unicode characters in the URL, or we will see something like the IDN homograph spoofing in Mozilla, something the open source guys were happy to sweep under the rug, but heaven forbid that IE would have been the one...

3. Support for CSS 2.0, 3.0. I totally agree we should have 100% support for XHTML, CSS, XML and XSL. I do think that should be limited to CSS 2.0 for the moment though, considering CSS 3.0 isn't even truly a standard yet.

4. True support for PNG and support for JPG 2000. For PNG, I agree. True suppport for PNG and the transparency levels should already be there. For JPEG 2000 support, I do not necessarily agree. I think support for JPEG 2000 could be comfortably rolled out with Longhorn, and from now till then, as a optional update.

5. Integration with Microsoft's spyware tools. I don't care if they include them or not, anything free is good, but I would prefer they increased security and control of IE to the point where spyware tools would be 'something we used to have to use.'

I don't think I ask for much, not from a company with millions of Windows users and the deep pockets Microsoft has, especially when you consider those deep pockets came from we the customers not so deep pockets...