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Well, back when I was using early betas of Netscape's new browser back in 2003 and saying that I thought it would take a bunch of market share on my blog, I got hostile emails that suggested I was an idiot in rather blunt terms. But I was right and they were wrong.

Here's my prediction this time around. While IE will likely take back some market share with the release of IE 7, all the gains will be erased within a year and they will have lost even more market share than they've lost today.

Although that's bleak prospect that you paint, I have to give you that one pal. IE is definitely not going to hand over Firefox nor Opera the browser crown.

It is nonsense. It makes the incorrect assumption that this is a battle between IE and FF. They are just a small part of a much larger battle between M$ and open source.

It does not really matter what redmond does to IE it is still teh same underlying junk code that does not play nice with easy extensions. It will get buried not by FF but by the extensions.

coboldinosaur,

Well, a lot of people seem to subscribe to the idea of a browser war. And I think this battle has been going on in the way before Open Source was a threat to windows.

Microsoft shouldn't fight each and every possible piece of software they don't create/build. Firefox makes a lot of Windows users happy, so why trying to ruin the party with the explorer approach to the internet: activeX or whatever, those transition effects nobody uses and so on...

This is lame. The only real argument here is that IE7 will surpass IE6. That's basically a given. Is there anything in IE7 that will stem the tide of Firefox devotees? I don't think so. There are a few fixed DOM and CSS rendering bugs, but there is very little improvement in its already-lagging browser standards support. If IE7 fully supported CSS2, heck, *I'd* switch from FF.

Hi markthomas,

Why do you think this is lame? You more or less discounted the crowd where FF was installed in their computers. If IE7 gets updated and they run it, they might make it their default browser.

Try to look at the IEBlog for info on the features of IE7.

Hi bonlebon,

I think MS will be hellbent or automatically upgrading IE6 to IE7. So I don't think they have conflicting interests in IE6 vs. IE7.