Microsoft to change IE sooner than expected

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The Register reports that Microsoft is preparing changes to IE in response to a patent ruling:
 
Microsoft may alter its dominant Internet Explorer Web browser following a ruling against it in a Chicago court earlier this month.

That is according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an industry standards body, which said on its Web site that the Seattle giant had told the group that changes to the software may be in order. It was in mid August that Microsoft lost a civil case brought against it by Eolas Technologies and was ordered to pay the company $520.6 million for infringing on patents relating to Internet Explorer (IE).

This has the potential to lead us in many directions, from boosting redesigns that conform to web standards down to increasing chaos in terms of active browsers out there and more tag soup to accommodate them. If Microsoft has an incentive -- and quite! El Reg reckons it to be in the range of hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars -- to modify IE, it will be very interesting to follow the trends in user agents as the Redmond giant pushes about 96% of Internet users to upgrade their browser.

And I guess we will have another version of IE after all!