Eyes Above The Waves

I've just read Chris Wilson's post on the IE Blog where he lists a number of CSS bugs and missing features that will be fixed in IE7. It doesn't bring them anywhere close to Gecko (nor Opera or Webcore or KHTML) but nevertheless it's a good step that will help a lot of Web developers.

Frankly, I'm surprised, because I had a few reasons to believe they would do almost nothing. As I've blogged before, there are strategic reasons for them to hold the Web back as much as possible, to maximise the pain for Web developers as an encouragement for them to migrate to Avalon. The IE team had been totally unwilling to publically commit to any concrete features or bug fixes. And when IE7 beta 1 had only a couple of bugs fixed, I thought my cynicism had proved correct; I expected them to have done any engine work before beta 1, so that Web developers have the maximum time to test and fix their sites. That's how we try to run Gecko/Firefox.

Anyway, I'm glad I was wrong! I applaud the team for doing the right thing to help web developers even though I suspect it will hurt Microsoft's big plans. I think it will even hurt IE market share: once IE7 has some penetration into the market, more web developers will feel justified in writing pages that don't cater to IE6. IE6 users on Win2K/win9x won't be able to run IE7; some of them will upgrade operating systems, but lots will find it easier to upgrade to Firefox.