We’re admittedly late to the party on this one, but Microsoft, our Seminar Series sponsor, has released the Vista beta (everything is a beta in the blogosphere, except Web 2.0, which is now point releasing up to 3.0 with even bigger fonts and zoomier dialog boxes). Included in the beta and much of the talk in the blogosphere is Internet Explorer 7. The IE Blog discusses the new features at length. And to us, especially in the book, the inclusion of RSS is the most important. When Keynoter Dean Hachamovitch first showed IE 7 at our San Francisco conference, the audience was most interested in the syndication features. Those features are going to do much to explain the benefits of blogging to a broader business audience.
Badges of Courage
My issue (again) is with the icons, or badges of courage as I call them. Now we’ve got another orange one about to be released to millions of users. Great that it’s the icon from Firefox, but it’s all broadcast looking and orange (not green, which is the new gray). It looks like there’s a WiFi hot spot near me instead of an available RSS feed.
Tabalicious
It wasn’t that long ago, when MS was dismissive of tabs and updating IE — they were heads down fixing security holes in Windows XP. A close second to RSS in the “life-changing” application department is tabbed browsing. I’ve been in client demos and seen the eyes pop when I open 9 tabs in one browser. Those eyes pop even more, when they get how RSS works.
Props
Even though I’m mostly a militant mac user, props for all the hard work. I know a few of the people that worked on the IE Beta and they’re not just embracing and extending any longer. They lived IE just like the rest of us that code websites for a living and talked with me and my fellow WaSPs at length about how to make a better browser. Soon enough, as the blogosphere loads the beta, we’ll know how well they did.
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