Gavin, 15 February 05
The news that IE will be updated shows microsoft finally accepting that it will have to respond to the mozilla and firefox challenge.
Previously, there had been announcements that there would be no updates to the IE6 browser until Longhorn ships (2007? 2008?). In XP SP2, the addition of pop-up blocking saw the first stages of a back-tracking that shows that recent increases in Firefox’s market share have been noticed in Redmond.
A user-centric wish-list for features for the next MS browser would almost certainly include tab-browsing and anti-phishing / anti-spyware measures. But more important for the health of the web in general would be CSS2 support and transparent pngs (with Google maps just recently showing some of the potential that could be made with the latter).
What IE7 is almost certain to lack is any cross platform code. Talk at present is for it to run in XP-SP2 only. It is suggested that even Windows 2000 or XP-SP1 need not apply. And if you are running Linux or Macintosh… you must be kidding (IE5 for Mac was for a while the benchmark for browser standards).
Mozilla projects offer not just a layout engine or browser controls. They have a rich cross-platform development framework based on XUL (XML User Interface Language) at their core. Thunderbird and Sunbird allowing mail and calendar functions are the two most mature projects to use the XUL framework – both show that it is a viable framework for a range of cross-platform applications. Google, by hiring mozilla developers and through the interfaces for maps.google.com has shown commitment to the mozilla framework and so further XUL apps seem likely.
The XAML that forms a core of the Longhorn GUI framework is unlikely to be included in IE7 – and unfortunately it is almost unimaginable that MS would use the XUL framework. XUL is not a W3 standard – but like all mozilla code is open source (with co-existing licenses to allow incorporation in closed projects) so barriers to adoption would be more ideological than legalistic or technological.
Microsoft might yet shock the world and meet halfway by embracing the W3C standard for XForms. This would boost the ability for sites to use pages with rich data manipulation without client side scripting.
