It can’t.

At least, that is what Dean Edwards is saying. He has had a look at the rendering engine used in IE, named Trident. He says that for that engine to support CSS2 properly, it would need to be completely rebuilt, which cannot be done by the date they are expected to release the first beta (sometime this summer).

Another option would be to use an unreleased engine that they may have developed, possibly a piece of Longhorn. Trying to shove that into the current IE framework would probably take longer than trying to rebuild trident.

Some are saying that if IE7 is released without a major improvement to push it past Firefox, such as CSS2 support, it would be a PR blunder for Microsoft. They will have been better off just waiting to release IE7 with Longhorn as they originally intended. My guess is that IE7 is basically going to be another security update, like what was released with XP SP2.

Even if IE7 did support CSS2, I doubt that I (or most) Firefox users would ditch their browser and go running back into the arms of big brother Bill. It may slow the bleeding, but only until the first exploit of IE7 is released a week later.

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