Now I am no big fan of IE, although I am a Microsoft Developer. In fact I rarely use IE except to do website reviews, instead use Firefox with the Tidy engine predominately because it cuts down significantly the time required. But defer to Opera for XML and XHTML because of the DOM inspector and debugging capacity, which ultimately assist website developers. And my normal viewing is Mozilla because of the secure email client.

So this is not a plug for downloading IE 7 beta 3, rather to try and explain something about Beta releases in general. The comments below come from a long history of both Alpha and Beta testing with Microsoft, Intuit, ID, Roxio, 3M and a host of other software developers, most of whom I still join in both Alpha and Beta testing today.

In the mid to late 1990's virtually every software developer shifted from in house design and testing which included Alpha testers, all of whom squashed bugs, assisted in redesign, features and so forth-all before shrink wrap or final distribution. Beta testing was firmly established for the general public and evidenced by multiple releases for every item of software and hardware released for consumption and the term bug free hardware or software was notion in antiquity.

The shift reduced the product delivery time significantly and formally set up a public beta testing which has prevailed ever since. The business model was simple: be there first no matter how good or bad, the general public will now develop and redesign the product.

So where does that leave us as whether to download IE 7 beta 3 or not? You may not have even been on the awards scene in the early 1990's and were not witness to the very different rendering of web pages of the dominant browsers at the time-IE and NS and the onslaught of questions and conflicting answers along with throwing web pages into disarray, so let up jump forward in real time to today, and the reason for the post about IE 7 beta 3 in the first place.

Today IE 6 will render web pages which are somewhat similar to any of the other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari or Mozilla, to name a few.

Tomorrow IE 7 will render web pages the same as the browsers mentioned above, with one caveat.

IE 7 will not be very forgiving, rather than lenient as was IE 6 for non compliant coding.

Tomorrow we will awaken to a viewing public who have downloaded IE 7 through Yahoo and AOL in its beta form, who will bring developers into questions and answers of the 1990's where web page views are now different, but nearly the same for other browsers.

Tomorrow we will awaken to a business reality that because of non compliant coding and code bloat, the world wide web is no longer a place for the little man. Internet Service Providers, Portals and backbones world wide are already feeling the pressure and time will dictate pricing and reasonable access to services.

Today is the time to reduce code bloat with CSS.

Today is the time to recognize that compliant coding significantly reduces time and reduces or eliminates the need for pricing changes to have reasonable access to services.

Today is the time for many things. For tomorrow may never, ever come.