More Details About Internet Explorer 7

By Jim on March 18th, 2005

I wish I could say I was excited about this but I’m not.

Last month, Microsoft decided that Internet Explorer could use a bit of a touch-up prior to the release of Longhorn next year. As a result, Windows XP SP2 users will be able to test drive a public beta of Internet Explorer 7.0 at some point this summer. The list of new features was short: namely increased security enhancements and not a whole much else, at least when the announcement was made.

Now, more details on 7.0 are becoming known. The new version of IE will be offered to users of Windows Server 2003 SP1 and the upcoming 64-bit flavor of XP as well as the previously-mentioned XP SP2 users. So what will they be getting? According to the ever-popular “anonymous sources,” IE 7.0 will finally sport tabs. In addition, it will finally render transparent PNGs properly, offer International Domain Name support, and possible a built-in news aggregator.

I stopped using IE ages ago and I don’t have any plans on going back. With Firefox and Opera available for Windows there’s just not much reason to bother with IE. It’s more of a headache than it’s worth at this point. Plus I’m in Linux or OS X most of the time anyway.

I guess there will be some IE users out there that will appreciate IE 7 though.