It's About Fucking Time

It's good to see that the industry "leader" in software and technology needed 10 years and seven versions of Internet Explorer to include a feature that every other browser on the planet has had for years.

On Wednesday, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, now featuring tabbed browsing. With this upgrade, it now joins the ranks of Firefox, Netscape, Opera, and, well, any other browser you can come up with to include that feature. It's good that Microsoft is right on the cusp of cutting-edge technology. (The Opera browser features an integrated BitTorrent downloader. That will probably be a dead format by the time Microsoft incorporates it into IE.)

In fact, if you look at all of the new features in IE 7, like integrated search and better security, you'll see that Microsoft looked at every browser out there, and included every feature they didn't have. Just years later. (I stopped using IE a number of years ago for many of these same reasons.)

I will give Microsoft props for one thing, though: They have the nicest-looking browser out of all of them; the other browsers look like the open-code, user-generated applications they really are. I do find it somewhat odd that the new, almost concurrent releases of iTunes and IE seem to have traded looks: iTunes took on the harsh, gun-metal grey appearance of IE, while IE went with the soft, luminescent blue appearance of iTunes.

We'll see how long it take for Microsoft to update IE again. I'm sure we can watch all the other browsers out there and see exactly what that new release will consist of.