Sooooo.. there will be an IE7 after all. I think anyone that is into reading tea leaves should have reconginzed that there was a strong possilibity of this happening. I mean, who was fooling when when the IE team all of sudden had a blog - how does a team that does not exist have a blog? I imagine coding has been going on for a while already since a lot of this work will probably leverage some of the stuff that was supposed to be in Longhorn (no inside knowledge, just a guess).

My big question is how or does this relate at all to the Avalon down-leveling that was announced a while ago. It raising some interesting questions:

• Will IE 7 be able to leverage Avalon? If so, then we already have a rough idea of IE7 timelines.
• Is it going to be just a browser or will it have some "smart client" like hooks in it to differentiate it from "regular" browsers? i.e., any special sauce for combo browser/winform/clickonce/whatever stuff. Not sure what exactly that would look like or why, but there are some interesting possibliities.
• How much of IE7 will be what we can expect to see in Longhorn? If its a lot like Longhorn's browser including Avalon support, how does that impact a developer's need for Longhorn.

I could go on and haven't put more than a nanosecond thinking about any of these things, but it will be interesting to see what we get this summer.