  Joel on Software   by Joel Spolsky Sunday, June 01, 2003
Internet Explorer 7.0  Interesting things are going on in the
browser front. Slashdot has discovered an off-the-cuff remark in
a chatroom by a Microsoft employee claiming that “IE6 SP1 is the
final standalone installation.” Little surprise; there has been
virtually no work on the IE web browser for a couple of years
now and it looks like Microsoft has no interest in spending
resources on a battle they already feel they've won.  Meanwhile
the Mozilla and Opera teams were getting bogged down in ground-
up rewrites, oops, so there was little or no serious competition
and IE climbed in popularity until today we have more than 90%
of the world using Windows IE 5 or 6.  Where it gets
interesting, is, approximately, today, because, for the first
time, the Mozilla Firebird browser has finally caught up with
Internet Explorer. After downloading virtually every Mozilla
release over the last three years, this is the first browser I'm
actually going to make my de