A Few Perspectives on Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer 7 has launched and the reviews are starting to come in. One big change in IE 7 is better integration of RSS feeds. I'm not entirely sold on the concept of being tied to a browser for RSS feeds, but I'm sure it will help a lot of people experience the value of feeds for the first time.

Here are a couple RSS related reports on IE from feed related businesses:

Bloglines points out an IE 7 add on that delivers easy access to a few popular Bloglines features:

Fred Wilson points out on A VC that IE 7 overrides webmaster's XSLT Stylesheets by default. Microsoft just happens to strip out the formatting and subscription options that happen to be offered alongside the content while still offering the ability to subscribe to the feed through their own product. For example, a person clicking on the feed for this site will see a FeedBurner formatted version of our feed which gives users options for subscribing to the feed through Bloglines, Google, My Yahoo, and Rojo to name a few. FeedBurner's Rick Klau explains how you can correct IE 7's aggressive RSS stylesheet override by disabling the feed reading view.

It will be interesting to see if IE 7 will help Microsoft gain back some of the market their they've lost to other browsers over the past couple years. As of this writing, IE is holding on to barely 50% market share among visitors to this site with FireFox taking 35% and Safari 9.5%. The audience for this site is more techie than the average web site's, but techies are often a leading indicator for market share on things like this.

CNET's review doesn't point out any significant features that will excite techies. In fact, CNET says it hasn't caught up to FireFox or Opera.

A step forward but hardly revolutionary changes. Microsoft tried to keep up with the competition not lead it and that is a major mistake. For the average user the back - forward and refresh buttons can be a bit inconvenient.

David, I think they should just work on being compatible with web standards rather than creating their own. Billions of dollars are wasted every year by businesses dealing with browser compatibility issues that could be prevented by sticking to standards.

One of the most interesting aspects of the IE vs. Firefox battle is the development of the ecosystem of extensions or add-ons. Right now firefox had a great advantage in this space but you can see microsoft trying to catch up.

I think the ecosystem for firefox and IE will decide who wins this battle. What do you think?

Personally, I'm a firefox fan. But recently, I decided to try IE7 and found myself with a ripped off version of firefox. They should've had something to blow away firefox rather then level with it.

Comments

1. Posted by: David Dalka on October 19, 2006 12:44 AM:

Things I dislike:
- refresh button on right side
- the back button can be whack

Things that shock me:
- the number of sites that don't present well when using it, ie needs to be backwards comaptible to old standards

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