Whither Internet Explorer 7.0?
Sean and Scott posted an interesting entry regarding the seemingly halted developmet status of Internet Explorer.
"With no significant features for nearly two years now except security patches it does give one pause. Not simply because its a shame that the product has essentially ceased development but that once the browser war was over Microsoft stopped innovating with Internet Explorer."
[...]
"Why don't we have tabs, RSS aggregators, bookmark sync utilities, mouse gestures, popup blockers."
I have to agree. Even though IE has a dominant (to say the least) market share, more and more people, especially developers are using Mozilla and MozillaFirebird (formerly Phoenix).
I'm using MozillaFirebird a significant amount now, specifically to use features that aren't included in IE; namely tabs and popup blockers. The browser load time is great, the footprint is small, I don't have to install all the crap that Mozilla base forces on me, it renders HTML almost exactly like IE and - the most important feature - it supports Alt-D to jump to the address bar (I wouldn't and couldn't use the browser until it supported this feature; the key combo is just too engrained in me).
I remember the thrill of waiting to see whether Microsoft or Netscape was going to be the first to release a beta of a new major version; the excitement of installing early alphas and betas just to check out the new features of each browser.
Now I'm going to the MozillaFirebird site at least once a week to download the latest nightly build. I can't remember the last time I was on the Microsoft Internet Explorer home page (before this post). Does Microsoft care about IE? Is there anyone working on new features? Are they planning something that will completely obsolete it (unlikely)?
Is IE is headed the way of the dinosaur Visual Source Safe, where all you see on the product home page is another service pack?