Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta Due This Summer

" 'Browsing is definitely a point of vulnerability,' Gates said." Bricks, when released in the air, will fall. Film at eleven.

'T'would be lovely to see a confirm-or-deny from Redmond on this one: "Ross Rubin, [...] added [...] 'Were there no Firefox, they'd have more leeway to sit on it until Longhorn.' "

Finally, here's Mozilla with a knife: " 'I can't think of a better validation of the success of Firefox,' said Decrem. 'The success of Firefox is forcing Microsoft to improve IE. The only surprise is that it took them this long to make that announcement. "

Nobody has yet explained exactly what the phrase "the company will ship an update to its browser separately from the next version of Windows" means. Some have written it as "divorced from Windows" but since it will only run on XP SP2 or later I think the longest bow which can be drawn here is "released asynchronously from Windows".

I hope it comes with session partitioning, so all of the spyware cun run at once without crashing the machine.

AC: Don't forget, the browser and windows are inseparable -- they "proved" it during the anti-trust trial by merging the browser people into the OS people -- then made annoucements later that separate downloads of IE would be unavailable...