That is one of the most famousest of headlines going on about the recent announcement made by Mr. Gates concerning Internet Explorer 7, which is going to be released earlier than expected (this year) and not glued together with a copy of the next Windows. All these days Firefox had been tickling Microsoft’s belly, gaining a respectable (actually it’s more like “astonishing” if you consider the short time it took) five percent of the market. Opera of course had never been able to capture any market share mostly due to its not being free and partly due to its not being all that great in any case, and so for Opera nothing will change – its tiny number of faithful users will probably weather the IE7 flood. Anyway, for Firefox IE7 can be disastrous unless they come up with FF2 soon with something awesomely great, including even faster launch times, all security issues quenched, the updating mechanism bettered and support for things like ActiveX, which is… to be honest… asking a little too much of them, but this is what is required. Plus there are IE-specific sites, especially some banking sites, which simply deny entrance to Firefox. But in the end, Firefox can’t cater to those sites which have been designed so that they look good only in IE, by adjusting their code to match IE’s idiosyncrasies.
To compete, FireFox needs to continuously provide the competitive edge and fast. The sleeping giant has awakened. The hammer shall fall.
–Karan
PS: IE7 will be only for Windows XP SP2