Internet Explorer 7 Release Party

Internet Explorer 7 was released  last night and I had the opportunity to go to the release party with my friend Jeremiah Owyang.  The event was billed as a 'Meet the Developers' event, which it was, but everyone involved knew it signaled the release of IE7.  Dean Hachamovitch, the General Manager for the IE development team, was a gracious host and made the rounds, answering the questions that bloggers and reporters around the room had for him, as did the rest of the IE7 development team.  And the food was good, too. 

Internet Explorer 7 is a huge improvement over IE6, with anti-phishing technologies and ActiveX opt-in, just to name a few.  Unluckily the biggest security improvement, the sandboxing of the browser, will only be available in Vista, and several other security features are only available from XP forward. 

I really like some of the new user experience upgrades, such as tabbed browsing, a spell checker for any text area (something I really need) and the integration of RSS into the browser.  Some users will probably be put off by the fact Microsoft is pushing IE7 out through Automatic Updates, but if a user doesn't know enough to stop IE7 from being installed on their system, they're probably one of the people most in need of having the added security of IE7 anyways.

Jeremiah and I recorded conversations with several of the developers, which will be available on my personal blog tonight, if all goes well.  We asked a number of questions that were supplied by our readers, and the team was very forthcoming.  I talked to several other bloggers to hear their impressions of the IE7 as well.  I never did get a straight answer as to how Microsoft makes money from IE7 though.