Beta Rant

I took a peek at Microsoft's IE7 beta website. It promises these nice things:

• Tabbed browsing - In Mozilla (later Firefox) since 2001, in some other browsers (some of them IE-based!) even earlier.
• Toolbar search box - in Mozilla since about 2000. For the sake of IE, i hope that it will at least support Mycroft plugins from the Mozilla world. (Mycroft, by the way, is supposed to be compatible with Sherlock technology, which is more or less standard in the Apple Macintosh world, but i never tried it.)
• Instant RSS feeds - supported in just about every possible piece of software released in the last couple of years. MS were really nice to take the icon for RSS from some minor non-innovative open-source browser called Firefox.
• Dynamic security protection - the release notes say that it means that ActiveX controls, CDF and IE-specific DHTML scripting are disabled by default. And in English it means this: Non-standard, non-portable, non-secure, useless, slow and outdated technology that was invented by Microsoft and botched into the monstrous medieval beast called IE4, is now removed by Microsoft from IE7. Because Microsoft, you see, is the leader of innovation in security. And in practice we're getting IE3 that masquerades as Firefox.
• And, last but not least: Streamlined user interface and Printing advances - whatever that is. Maybe they will use Ctrl-T for opening a new tab.

All this so-called innovation under the tagline saying Change just became extraordinarily good. I suppose that this tagline is targeted at users who are afraid of change. Well, i've got news for Microsoft - these users are stupid enough to use Internet Explorer in the first place, who would ever think that they will understand the message of the tagline? Or, for that matter, bother to think at all?

And why, for God's sake, do Microsoft even call this "change"?

P.S.: I haven't tried installing the beta yet. It overwrites IE6 and i need usable IE6 for some tasks at work. Isn't it ironic that i admit it after writing all that?

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