It’s been over five years since Microsoft has released a new version of Internet Explorer, but today they released Internet Explorer 7. I was actually pretty impressed with it, but once you download it, you realize how badly Microsoft had ignored the web browser.

In the five years since Internet Explorer 6 was released, browsers have progressed by leaps and bounds. IE 7 jumps on the bandwagon with just about everything. It does tabs really well (Hey, is there a major browser that doesn’t have tabs?) It has incredible RSS support (better even than FireFox.) It does some major house cleaning of the toolbars (actually, it’s quite spartan now … and nice.) It even improved on CSS rendering. Unfortunately, I feel like IE is still playing catch-up (like a boxer after a five year hiatus.) If it goes another five years without a major release, it will be dead. Instead, they should plan some decent improves for a year from now (maybe a 7.5.) So, where does it need to improve? Web Standards (especially CSS). Come on, isn’t it about time that we got 100% compliance?

More importantly, what trends does IE7 cement on the web?
Tab browsing is here to stay. That means people can browse more pages, more quickly. Hey, I guess we need to work harder on keeping peeps around.

RSS Is Big. M$ puts some major muscle behind RSS. Expect to see sites that don’t have an implimitation scrable to get some sort of RSS. It’s going to get a lot bigger.

Zoom! I feel like the Zoom functionality will be big for accessibility. Or at least old folks. I expect it will become more common.

All in all, a long needed release to help push the web along.