Quite some time ago, Microsoft announced renewed interest in updating their flagship browser, Internet Explorer. It is a widely known fact that Internet Explorer has some serious deficiencies in terms of compliance with the web standards. The deficiencies I talk of, are a major pain in the arse for most web developers who choose to develop sites according to the web standards.

On Friday just passed, the IE7 team annouced some new features which will definitely be included in the next release of IE. In case you don’t feel like clicking the link, the couple that have been confirmed are:

• support for per pixel alpha channel filtering in PNG images (this can be used for transparency)
• addressing major inconsistency problems in the CSS engine, including fixes for the peekabo & guillotine bugs.

I really did have some serious reservations about what the new IE7 would come to the table with. To be honest, I thought it was going to be more of a security release with very minor improvements to the rendering engine. If this release ends up fixing some/most of the major issues that web developers face battling IE and the standards, it will be a glorious day.

Go Microsoft, I mean, go Team IE!
Did I just say that aloud?

Apple have recently announced that the new version of OS X is about to be released, code named Tiger. Among some of the 200+ cool features being added into the system this time, the most significant one I have anything to do with (since I don’t own a Mac, however I recently purchased an iPod Mini), is Safari.

Safari 1.3 boasts a huge feature set, improved performance, thousands of bug fixes; the list is long.

This really is making the gap between every other browser and Internet Explorer more and more evident. Essentially, the top 5 browsers out side of IE now have full support for the standards; to me this is just a wonderful thing. In the near future, maybe we’ll be without CSS hacks for the other quality browsers and maybe, just maybe, it’ll push Microsoft to join the game.