"What's the most significant change for website owners in IE7?"
From me at MIX06
Well, for me, one of them is the concept of Tab Groups. In the same way that Firefox uses tabs to display multiple pages, IE7 adopts the same approach.
It also, however, offers the ability for users to create "Home Tab Groups" rather than simply a single home page. So, a user will have a number of home pages, one of which will be displayed as the default window, but the others will load in the background; so when a user clicks on a tab, the page appears immediately.
The implication of this, is that back in the internet heyday, there was a desperate push to be user's home pages. This led to sites trying to become 'portals' in order to give someone everything they could possibly need in a single home page.
Pretty soon, they gave up, realising that there was only a finite number of sites that were going to win this battle.
However, the battle is back, but not to be THE home page, but just one of a number that together make up a set of information that is useful to a user.
My ideal homepage is a combination of the FT, Virgin Atlantic's special offers, BBC News, and of course, Howard Van Rooijen's blog.
With Home Tab Groups, I can load all of those, and flick around them before going on to my daily web surf, or recall them all at the flick of a button to see what's going on in the worlds of big business, travel and .Net!
Site owners probably need to be thinking of tailoring landing pages for use as Tabbed Home Pages that are different from the main site home page. For example, the Virgin Atlantic Special Offers page may be more relevant to me than the main page.
If a site owner can offer a number of options for different user types, usres will begin self-selecting what content sets are most relevant to them, and are more likely to hit a button that says "Make this page one of my home tabs" than they are to totally replace their one and only home page.
Not only is this more useful to the user, but site owners will be able to gather much more and better intelligence on who is consuming what types of information from the site, and which of their tailored home pages is most effective.