IE7 isn’t the latest incarnation of the popular Microsoft web browser, Internet Explorer. What IE7 is, is a compliance patch for Internet Explorer that allows it to properly parse compliant Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

What IE7 does:

Using IE7 is quite simple. You download a small zip file, decompress it, then upload the ie7 directory to your web server. Then on pages that you want to enable the IE7 patch you add five lines of code. That’s it, you’re pages will be IE7 enabled.

To see what IE7 fixes check out their compatibility page. As a warning, IE7 is currently considered alpha software. However, having to not deal with as many quirks and tricks for Internet Explorer is a very good thing.

NOTE: Dean Edwards, the creator of IE7, has a shiny new blog. His first entry discusses two of his web projects including IE7.

UPDATE: Matt Hartley over at Lockergnome had this to say about IE7: