When I heard the news about the upgrade to Internet Explorer I first laughed. Microsoft had no plans on releasing a stand alone version until now. The only reason they are updating is because of security issues and maybe some Firefox envy. Since this is a number upgrade, I’ve been thinking about it and hoping that Microsoft does more than patch security holes.

Now I don’t hate IE because of who it is, I hate IE because of how it renders pages. Internet Explorer has a tendency to do a half assed job of rendering code correctly, so people then code half assed. That’s not a good trend. A browser and a developer need to adhere to the W3C standards and code correctly.

What I’m hoping is that in the new Internet Explorer they fix some of thier outstanding issues and bring their browser up to todays standards. Much like Safari or Firefox. I’d love to see PNG transparency added and better CSS support. If they were to do that, their browser could then regain some of it’s lost ground to Firefox and it might actually be a good browser again. The best part is that all the designers who design for IE only would be forced to clean up their act! Now that’s what I really want to see.

Only time will tell. I think I’ll be disappointed since I don’t think highly of Microsoft, but maybe Internet Explorer 7 will be a good upgrade for the PC users.