OK, so I was down on IE since I switched to firefox early in 2006. I hesitated upgrading to IE7 but I kept getting those update notices from MS and figured I’d go ahead and install IE7 on my Dell M1210 to see how it performs.

I’m not too familiar with all the new features but I have to admit that the ability to read RSS-XML is big! Why? The main reason I can think of is that IE is still used by the bulk of internet users. Many have switched over to firefox sometime during 2006, but Microsoft still rules the roost.

Who is your audience? Checking site stats in awstats reminds me that the majority of users are using internet explorer over other browsers such as firefox, thunderbird or opera. In a previous post I mentioned that clicking on an XML file extension in firefox 1.5 would bring the page up in a text xml format. In the new IE7, instead of a text page that may confuse the average user, we get a nicely formatted page of content that appears like a typical html page.

Click the thumbnail here to see a screenshot of the XML output.