More news on the Internet Explorer front from the IE blog:

As we get close to the final availability of Internet Explorer 7, I want to provide an update on our distribution plans. To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates (AU) shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP, planned for the fourth quarter of this year.

There will be the option to roll back to IE6 at any point or ignore the update (up to a certain point I should imagine) for those corporate installations that need to take their time about these things.

I think pumping it out through Automatic Update is a good thing, and not just from the security point of view. As a web developer I'm all for a mechanism that gets a more standards compliant rendering engine out there onto as many computers as possible. The memories of the upgrade path from IE5 to IE6, and watching visitor statistics slowly change, is still indelibly etched on my mind.

I'm still confused about what they're playing at with the user interface though.

Dave Hyatt has done it.

(More on the Acid2 test at the Web Standards Project)

Chris Wilson has posted some more details about IE7 on the IEBlog, and so far so good. Looks like it's more than just a security fix with better standards support on the way. So far he's confirmed alpha channel support in PNGs and fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs.

In other news Dave Hyatt is rattling through Safari's Acid2 bugs. I'm beginning to think he doesn't sleep you know.

Somehow I missed the Bill Gates announcement, but just picked this up on the IEBlog

Today at RSA, Bill Gates talked about Internet Explorer 7. As the guy responsible for IE, I wanted to say a couple of things about it.

First, some basics: we’re committing to deliver a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP customers. Betas of IE7 will be available this summer. This new release will build on the work we did in Windows XP SP2 and (among other things) go further to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software.

There's no word yet on new features or improved standards support, it could just be a version number bump with nothing more than security fixes, but things are definitely going to get interesting this summer.

In an interesting bit of news (via DrunkenBlog) it appears that Google has hired Ben Goodger, one of the lead developers on Firefox.

As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general.

Time to restart the GoogleBrowser rumours again? Given how much you can customise Firefox/Mozilla through the use of XUL, I wouldn't be surprised if Google has something much bigger than just a branded browser up it's sleeve. We just haven't worked out what it is yet. Front end to the GoogleGrid perhaps?