MS announces IE7 for XP — Too little, too late?
Microsoft announced that there will be an IE7 beta this summer, contradicting their previous plan to only offer a new Internet Explorer in Longhorn. It seems that Firefox is getting a bit too strong for their likes and MS needs a way to try and win back marketshare (or at the very least mindshare). Is this a case of too little, too late? Arguably the biggest hurdle in getting people to switch to Firefox is getting them to install and use a browser other than the one that is bundled in the OS.
At this point, Microsoft is playing catch up with their 6 year old code base (IE6 was released in 99) against a versatile open-source project. It seems as though internal Microsoft bureaucracy stands in the way of being able to release new features as quickly as the Firefox crew can. After all, IE developers have to worry about the much-lauded OS/Browser integration and the effects a security issue in IE can have on the entire OS. Consumers are already turned off to IE (if not Microsoft in general), Microsoft is going to have to do a lot more than they have been doing to win them back.
