Explorers and Navigators

I‘ve been sporadically following the discussion about IE 7 and the issues around compliance and that. Paul “Master Programmer” Thurrott weighs in, once again (Besides using CTRL F in Firefox, you can also use the vi command ‘/’ to start searching inline). Chris Wilson (Program manager IE) did an interesting interview at ZDNet.

The rendering itself, and the layout itself, is something that we’ll continue to iterate on. And it’s possible that we’ll replace it with a different engine even, at that level, although that’s not replacing the entire dynamic HTML engine – it’s replacing just a piece of it. The hard part is that the baseline for what you need to support for that rendering engine is actually quite large. It’s clear just from how long it took the Mozilla guys to build up their Gecko engine – that wasn’t something that they did in a year or two years. I think it took them 5 years before they actually did a first release of the Gecko engine in the key Web browsers

So, don’t expect major changes in IE 7. Stick with Opera and Firefox/Mozilla and only use IE 7 to launch your Windows Update sessions (after all, Windows Update requires ActiveX).

Update: I was reinstalling Windows 98 on an older computer and I thought it was hilarious seeing those Win 98 banners claiming things like ‘more secure’, ‘safer’ and ‘easier to use’. I mean, these are the same things people have been claiming after each new Windows version was released. And this is called progress?

Update 2: As mentioned in the comments, Firefox 2 now carries ‘shiny’ movable tabs. You can download (beta!) it right from here. Oh. And Micro Summary thingies. I wonder which version will break this new feature.