Just read a post over on my former colleague Nariman's blog about issues he's been having with IE7 crashing.  I thought it was just me, but apparently not!

 

My experiences are similar to Nariman's and indeed a lot of other folks - I have about three to five tabs open, browsing a variety of sites when the browser locks up.  I attempt to close down the tabs, which seems to have little effect.  Then, the browser suddenly disappears completely.

 

At first, I thought it could be an issue with WSS v3 synchronization since this seemed to be when the problems would present themselves most frequently.  Then it started happening indiscriminantly.

 

I had quite high hopes for IE7 after following the dev team's blog for over a year, and it seems certain that everyone on the team has a sincere desire to make a really excellent product.  That said, inexplicable crashes seem somewhat sophomoric given the maturity of the platform and that its predecessor was nowhere near this unstable.

 

I anxiously await the next update/service pack release.

 

 

Mary-Jo notes over on her blog that MSFT is preparing to release its own end-user mashup tool to compete with Yahoo! Pipes.  Previously code-named "Tuscany", there will be an announcement sometime in the next month that will reveal the new Web 2.0 strategy.

 

I certainly hope something meaningful is on the horizon, as I find the approach so far for developers fragmented.  Yes, we can now code AJAX apps with UpdatePanels and make seamless XmlHttpRequests to webservices, but try writing a Virtual Earth mashup as quickly as a RubyOnRails developer can with Google Maps.  There's still a lot to do to simplify the process.