IE7: Defining your priorities

Now this is one of the things that make us IT Professionals want to laugh and cry at the same time. I personally spent at least a few minutes laughing to the point of shedding a tear and I hope this is just a joke (it’s not btw). From the IE blog:

Hopefully, by now you’ve seen from our posts that there are a lot of new features and work going into IE 7. As part of this update, we’re refreshing our icon and logotype. We considered more radical departures from our current logo, but blue e with the ring is very recognizable and familiar to users, so we elected instead to make more subtle changes.

As you can see, the new e has more modern look, and the edges are a bit darker so the icon stands out better against different backgrounds. We liked the gold ring too since it brings in new energy and helps the icon pop a bit more than the old one.

This icon and text treatment will be used on the versions of IE 7 for Windows XPSP2, Server 2003 SP1, and x64 versions. We’ll have a slightly different look for the Windows Vista version, one that’s more consistent with the icons there. We’re not quite ready with that one yet, but we’ll share it here once we do.

We’re happy with how this turned out; I hope you like the new look too.

As an IT Professional, how refreshing do you find it that the IE7 team is spending resources to touch up their logo? Does the gold ring take away the fact that you’re facing downtime and monthly reboots due to the security exploits in IE? Seriously guys, if you’ve found someone with the time to play with the logo in the midst of all the security issues you need to clear up that departments headcount and move them into R&D.