IE7 coming within the month, Firefox 2 RC2 out as well
It’s kind of interesting to get to do a “browser wars” kind of post where I mention a new release of two browsers coming out about the same time…. The release of IE7 is coming within weeks we are reminded by zdnet. It’s noted that it will be rolled out through automatic updates not long after it’s official release. Incidents.org is less than enthusiastic about the release suggesting that no matter how much of an improvement over IE6 this new release will be it’s bringing us features that have been in competing browsers since 1996 and diversity of browsers is a good policy.
The IE blog asks if we’re ready for the coming of IE7…. I’d suggest any site owners that are interested in their web sites traffic to download IE7 Release candidate and test their sites. That’s the way I discovered that the stattraq plugin on some of my wordpress sites was preventing the display of the page in Internet Explorer 7. I filed it as an IE7 bug (which in reality I think it is, since it’s the only browser that misbehaves this way.) But, I also disabled the plugin to work around it until the browser is fixed. (Last I looked, I was told that only the most voted for bugs would be fixed before final release, so I’m not holding my breath.)
Turn your eyes over towards mozilla.org where the 2nd RC of Firefox 2.0 is available for testing. I don’t know when the release of Firefox 2.0 is planned, but with an RC2 out I’m sure it’s probably within weeks as well. It’ll be nice to see where the two main browsers stack up after this round of updates.