[via BetaNews]

Interesting interview of Gary Schare, Director of IE Product Management, from BetaNews. It is about IE7, RSS, Firefox’s growth.

We really didn’t announce a restart of IE development, we announced an extension of the development to bring the work that we were doing in IE7 for Windows Vista down to Windows XP users. […]

The primary driver behind expanding the reach of IE7 to Windows XP was security. […]

There are a number of new feature areas that were showing up in alternative browsers — ones built on the IE platform like Maxthon and Avant Browser, as well as the alternatives such as Netscape, Firefox and Opera — that people said they would really love to see in addition to better security. […]

At the same time, there are alternative technologies that we’re investing in and bringing out to developers, such as the Windows Presentation Framework and the Windows Communication Framework. We’ll be pushing those quite aggressively in March at the Mix 06 conference. We expect a lot of developers to utilize those rich client platforms for building Web-based applications, but we certainly don’t expect ActiveX to go away in any way, shape or form. […]

In general, competition is a good thing, and we respect the work that the Firefox guys have done. It was interesting to read their assessment on their public blogs when we released IE7, and the respect that they showed for us. […]

We’ve built the first RSS platform that any developer can take advantage of, so when you subscribe to a feed in IE7, that feed data will be available to any application that wants to look at it. This opens up a whole new host of RSS reading applications, as well as applications that in the past would have nothing to do with RSS, but now can take advantage of it because of the platform.