I saw this article on Yahoo - Microsoft Admits Internet Explorer Mistakes - and it has prompted me to write this post… plus it was getting kinda quiet around here!Aside from mentioning how Internet Explorer 7 will embrace standards and play nice(er), Bill Gates comes out with a lovely quote about how Microsoft is “immersed in the browser as a platform”. This kind of annoyed me slightly because IE7 is still very much a component of Windows rather than a browser in its own right.Yes, it is a separate download, but there are still restrictions on who can run it. My pet peeve is that you need SP2 installed, mainly because it ties in with all the additional security features. For home users its not so big an issue, however for corporate users it is a major annoyance.SP2 introduced lots of features which made it unpopular as a corporate desktop, most notably restrictions on numbers of connections and the new security centre - which does not play nice with some of the computer management/audit packages out there. As a result, a lot of the larger companies have resisted the upgrade. We certainly are still on SP1, as initial upgrades to SP2 had to be rolled back due to its catastrophic effects. For employee’s to install it on a standard build, it becomes a sackable offense.This of couse makes it extremely frustrating from a Web developers perspective as it restricts the testing we can do with this new iteration of the browser. We took the step of setting up a separate testbed, but I’m sure quite a few companies wouldn’t bother. Wether they are caught pants down come release day or not, Microsoft isn’t doing much to help the developer in this area, so far refusing to offer stand-alone versions for earlier versions of XP or Windows 2000.If anyone from Microsoft is reading, you would make a load of corporate Web developers really happy if you released a stand-alone version! (more…)