The web is abuzz with nothing this morning. Not that everyone isn’t talking about the IE7 announcement yesterday, just that nobody has anything important to say. Obviously people feel FireFox pushed Microsoft into this. Which unnerves me. Not because FireFox isn’t a fantasic browser, just that it had nothing to do with Microsoft announcing IE7, except maybe the timing of the announcement.

Let’s be clear: the IE team never died. It was reprioritized, but it never died. Roughly 8 months to a year ago, it started building and growing. Currently the IE team is one of the crack ones in Microsoft. Believe it or not, some of the best PM’s, devs and testers are now on the IE team and they’re ready to kick ass.

Think about that: 8 months ago. Where was FireFox at in May of last year? It was barely a blip on the radar of browsers. Sure, the writing was on the wall, but IE development was restarted for 2 reasons: customers asked loud enough (and often enough), and Longhorn is coming so a new browser needed to be started.

Okay, rant over. Back to the purpose of this post: what will IE7 include.

Obviously I can’t claim I have any inside information. The IE team is being tight lipped, which is good. But, they’ve never really been blabber-mouths.

That said, they have been talking for the last 8 months, and that means something because as I sit here collating some of that data a few things are clear to me. In no particular order, here are the things that are obvious to me about the next version of IE. Please remember this is just my perception, and could quite likely be completely wrong:

1. Microsoft is going to seriously tackle standards. I say this, because the IE team recently stopped being defensive about things they weren’t doing. In fact, just a week ago one of the evangelists recommended people use a CSS attribute that IE doesn’t support to achieve a result they were looking for. I’m sensing a shift towards “what’s real” in the current builds coming out, as it’s not the first time.
2. IE’s security model will be completely redone. It was already given a major overhaul in XP SP2′s IE version, but it’ll get another one. That said…
3. ActiveX will not be dropped. The problem is that people perceive ActiveX in a certain way. I could see Microsoft relabelling the objects to something like ASO’s (ActiveX Secure Objects) or something. But ActiveX is valuable, and is inherently (as a way of implementing instant page-specific plugins and applets) fine. It’s no worse than XUL in that way. So, no, it’s not going away.
4. They will attempt to redefine tabbed browsing. Honestly. Believe it. They’ve been hinting at this for more than 6 months, including in a Channel 9 interview. I’ve heard of early builds which are very sweet, though not as smooth (yet) as other tabbed browsing interfaces.
5. IE will be further modulized (is that a word?). IE is going more places. They made XP more modular so that it could go more places, and IE will be the same. As a platform, it has to be.

Now, that said, it won’t be perfect. So you’ll get the standard “they didn’t do enough”, “they’re just copying everyone else”, “this is all in reaction to FireFox” types of things. And that’s fine. It’s to be expected and it’s deserved considering how little has been done on IE in nearly 5 years. But, there will be some fairly big innovations (notice the small ‘i’) and changes to IE. Will it be better than FireFox? Who knows. But, really, if it got tabbed browsing, support standards more than any other browser and had a completely revamped (and secure) security model, that would basically change the dynamics of this browser war.

The problem is that IE does need to do more than that. The question is “what?” What would actually swing 25 million people back to IE? If anyone could answer that, FireFox would be working on it already.

Heating up? Yep. Watch this space, as I’m heading down to Microsoft tomorrow and I’ll be poking and prodding. I’m not sure anyone’ll say anything. But, like the last 8 months, it might be what isn’t said that’s more important.