I’ve been sitting on this for so long it hurts. This week at Gnomedex, Microsoft will be demo’ing IE7. I’m not sure if they’ve decided if they’ll be releasing a beta yet (there was some discussion of that), but they will be doing a strong demo.

Dave Winer’s already endorsed the browser, from an RSS perspective:

On Friday you’ll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser. But that’s just the tip of what may turn out to be a very big iceberg. The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally — that there were applications of RSS that aren’t about news.

This isn’t the first time you’ll hear this type of reaction in the next week or so. You’ll also hear it about tabs, bookmark management, download management, security and standards (oh, and extensions).

The IE team has, to put it mildly, decided that the best way to rock the world is to:

1. Do the right thing
2. With the right people
3. At the right time
4. By empowering users to make a choice
5. Through a friendly, manageable, secure browser
6. That gets out of the way
7. And lets you actually surf the bloody internet with less worrying
8. Than any other browser
9. But
10. This will still be a beta
11. So, expect some issues
12. But also expect to be impressed
13. If only that they’ve done everything you’ve asked
14. And then some
15. In spite of constant criticism
16. That they totally deserved
17. Either way
18. We’ll have a great new browser
19. In just a few months
20. Yay!