Over at the IE Blog, this news flash just appeared:
We’ll post an updated pre-release build of IE7 for Windows XP publicly – no MSDN membership required – during the first calendar quarter of 2006.
At first I didn’t understand why this is taking so long. Then it dawned on me: The feature set of IE7 has to be in perfect sync between Windows Vista and Windows XP. And now that Windows Vista Beta 2 has been pushed sometime into the New Year, that means IE7 has to lag as well.
Good news for the Firefox folks, who just shipped version 1.5.
Ed Bott 
The feature set of IE7/XP and IE7/Vista will never be in sync. There are Vista-specific features that XP will never support. I think they decided to hold off to impement some additional “features” like removing the Intranet Zone.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/12/07/501075.aspx
I happen to like the Intranet Zone!
The “browser is part of the OS” mentality really bothers me. Once Vista ships, can we expect another five-year wait before IE8 appears in Vista’s successor? Why can’t Microsoft treat IE like Windows Media Player and put out new versions when it makes sense?
Waitaminit, maybe revving IE every five years does make sense, at least for Microsoft. They have no incentive to strictly follow standards if the result is that everyone can move to Ajaxified browser apps and the web servers become nothing more than commoditized XML web services.
It would have been more accurate if I had referred to the code base rather than the feature set.
IE7 for Windows Vista will be a superset of IE7 for XP. They’ll work from a common code base, which is the one written for Vista. Features that require Vista to be installed will “silently degrade” in XP.
So in effect, what you are saying is that we XP users will be gatting an inferior product after all. Well that is how I read it anyway. If,in fact, that is the case, why did MS say that this was the best in the first place. Wouldn’t it have been much simpler to have built a browser to exceed what Firefox and Opera have now, and while doing that, insure that those who over time defected, are inticed back to the new IE? J.B.
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize what I said that way.
Windows XP and Windows Vista will have different architectures. To the extent that XP is “inferior” to Vista, because it’s older and was not designed with the same base code, than any program that runs on XP will be “inferior” to one that runs on Vista.
That would of course be true with Firefox as well. I fully expect that Firefox developers will be able to add features (including security features) that are more robust in Windows Vista than in Windows XP.
I think it has nothing to do with the feature set or with Vista. Microsoft announced IE 7 in February to freeze the market and to try to stem the tide of defectors to Firefox. They knew it was more than a year’s worth of work to build a browser that works with today’s web. They intentionally announced early and continued to hint at a nearterm arrival knowing that it would help to stall Firefox adoption.
They’re much better at marketing than at actually making software 🙂
A
Reference my comments above, I could have put it better but I got on my high horse and let rip. What I was trying to say was that although Firefox has it’s faults Microsoft often doubles them by trying to beat everybody to the punch announcing that they have a super product, when in fact all they are doing is hyping it up into a frenzy,so that it gets all the attention of the press and anyone else who has any influence. That’s very naughty in my estimation. J.B.