Sound exciting? For us, and other web developers the world over, this is big news and potentially a major headache.

IE6 has been out since 2001, with no major updates made to how it renders web pages. Many changes have occurred in the web development world since then, including huge leaps forward in the area of web standards, and the adoption of these standards by modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

IE6 has fallen far behind on this front. Due to this fact, and its still-dominant market share, the web has become riddled with filters and “hacks” designed specifically to identify IE and serve it different content than other, more standards-compliant web browsers. (To be fair, there are plenty of hacks written for other browsers too, but due to its market dominance and the length of time IE6 has been available, IE hacks have taken on a life their own.)

Enter IE7. With this version, the IE development team is aiming to fix many of the browser’s long-standing rendering bugs. Sounds great, right? But what about all of those hacks out there written especially for the old, buggy IE behavior… In many cases, those hacks will cause sites to break on IE7.

So, with beta releases of IE7 now available, web developers everywhere begin the thankless task of trudging through site after site, testing and repackaging or removing old IE hacks. Sadly, we’ll join this procession.

Kudos to the IE team for keeping the IE7 release process open to the public via their blog, and generally recognizing the need to involve the web development community — at least giving us a head-start. And it’s exciting to see Microsoft get on the ball with web standards support — in the end, IE7 will make developer’s lives easier and user experiences better — but the Redmond behemoth is causing us some serious pain in the short term.