In case you didn’t know, Internet Explorer 7 (beta) has been released to testers this week. Under the small, but growing threat from Firefox, Safari and Opera, MS decided to bring back their IE team and throw out a new browser to keep their current customers, and maybe win some back. A lot of people, myself included, was hoping to see some major rendering fixes so that web design and development would be much easier.

Anyone heralding the announcement of IE7 as a major leap forward for web standards is kidding themselves. Apparently, almost none of the well known IE bugs have been fixed since IE6 was released. I won’t bore you with all the particulars of escaping floats and hover states, but the point is that Microsoft is making it very difficult for web designers to write clean, fast code for use in all browsers.

Generally speaking, one has to write code to standards, then go back and fix all the IE issues that crop up. Granted … it’s a beta release, so I’m not too worried yet. If IE7 is released alongside Vista, we’ll be waiting at least 12-16 months anyhow. It’s just that, if no major strides are made between now and then with their browser, it’s going to be holding back the web … again.

Even what I would consider basic CSS formatting issues are still unresolved. But hey, they’ll have RSS integration (something every other major browser has had for months, or in some cases, a year). I sincerely hope that anyone reading this page uses an alternative browser – Firefox, Safari, Opera, whatever.