Say what???!
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AJAX is the most promising and coolest thing happening in the web world at the moment – a part of the web 2.0 movement!
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If you read any web 2.0 blogs it seems that IT IS the web 2.0 movement. Anyway, it represents a paradox in my opinion.
Suddenly the AJAX wave comes sweeping from behind and now anybody who is anybody must implement it in some way, not to fall behind the hype of course. The tools are coming along slowly now – Ajax.net and Atlas to name some. The problem is that the development time needed to implement AJAX is still so extensive (and thereby expensive), that it may not be desirable in many situations.
The entire idea behind AJAX is to make the web act more like a windows (and linux, mac etc.) application. This is the paradox. We spend more and more money developing websites that act more and more like a windows application, when we could have used our time and efforts on developing distributed windows applications (it could be .NET smart clients). We try to come as close as we can with the help of AJAX, but we know that we will never get there. But still, we put so much effort in a lost cause. Somehow it makes me feel sad...
The problem is that there is no alternative. Smart clients are not widely supported, and will not leave the intranet and go world wide web anytime soon. No technology is likely to revolutionize the way we use the internet in the near future, so we’ll have to keep trying to make the most of it – even though it is a lost cause in the end.
For those of you who tried the beta 1 release, you would agree that a lot has happened since then. The design has improved, the RSS aggregator feature has improved along with a lot of things. The tabbed browsing also works much better; in fact, they work better than they do in Firefox. For a full review of IE7 beta 2 check Paul Thurrot’s site http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/ie7_beta2.asp and download IE7 here.
So what is the news?
I think the news in IE7 is the news about the release itself. It has been more than four years since IE6 was released, and a lot have happened on the browser market since. IE7 brings little new in form of functionality. It is as though Microsoft looked at the other browsers on the market, and copied the ideas and wrapped them up in an IE experience. And this is actually a good thing. Why you ask? Because no matter what browser you use, it roughly has the same features implemented the same way. This makes the switching easier, especially for non-geeks, and that way makes the whole internet experience more seamless.
Now you can choose.
In a couple of months when IE7 is released, people want to upgrade their IE6. The interesting thing is, that this is the first IE release in a browser market with serious competitors. Think about it. When IE6 was released in 2001, the only big competitors where Netscape and Opera. Netscape was a huge clumsy program bundle and Opera had banner ads if you didn’t pay for it. These did not represent a real alternative to IE6. Now it’s a lot different as you properly know.
Now people have a choice. They can choose IE7 or Firefox/Opera. Of course, a lot of people don’t care or don’t know and will automatically get IE7 from windowsupdate. But the rest, and that’s a lot of people, will be given a choice they haven’t been forced to make before and that’s what going to be interesting. The choice is not whether or not to upgrade IE7 – we all want the newest software. The choice is whether or not you will use it as your primary browser.
Will you choose IE7?