It seems like I'm not the only person underwhelmed by the recent Internet Explorer 7 beta release. Alex Russell, one of the guys behind the brilliant Dojo Toolkit, has a blog post entitled How IE7 Can Avoid Irrelevance which lists a number of places where Internet Explorer is deficient when it comes to DHTML/AJAX development. He writes

At a minimum, dynamic web apps need the following out of IE and JScript in the very near future:

• Memory leaks need to simply disappear
• Fix the cache+gzip bugs
• Give us getters/setters in JScript or give back watch()
• Fix the event object. Pass it in to DOM handlers by default. Also, offsetLeft and offsetTop are so ambiguious as to be useless. Give us currentTarget.
• Bump the limit on the number of concurrent HTTP connections if those connections are initiated after onload (either via XMLHTTP or other methods)
• Today, allocating more than 5K objects or so brings JScript to its knees. Object allocation cost needs to be O(1)
• Either revive (and start to fix) VML or give it an SVG-Tiny+DOM facade
• Give us a persistent, string-keyed, local cache in the MB range (5-10MB/domain seems a good start)
• Fast DOM queries. CSS selectors or XPath, we don’t care. Just give us a way to say “get us all DOM node objects matching this”
• A way to toggle the box model on a per-element basis without switching doctypes. The CSS 3 box model spec seems a good starting point

If Microsoft is to re-build any credibility around their browser, they need to show us the goods. CSS fixes won’t suffice this time around.

This is a pretty good list and it contains a lot of the features Jon Udell mentioned that he would like to see in future versions of Internet Explorer in his post Further adventures in lightweight service composition . The only thing I'd change about Alex's post would be to rename it How IE8 Can Avoid Irrelevance. I've worked at Microsoft long enough to know that by the time a product hits beta 2, the only kind of changes you are going to see are fixes to major [as in crashing] bugs, security fixes and low cost cosmetic changes. I can only hope that it doesn't take us another five years to see the next version of Internet Explorer

On the positive side, it looks like Dean Hachamovitch who runs the IE team not only has read Alex's blog post but posted a response . That's a good start. .