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Microsoft Releases IE7 Beta 3
Kawahee writes "Microsoft has released IE7 Beta 3 to the public. From TechNet Flash: 'As a result of customer feedback, IE7 Beta 3 contains some feature changes in addition to the planned reliability, compatibility, and security improvements. If you've previously installed a beta of IE7, you should uninstall it before installing this release.' For the first time, the Administrator's Kit for Internet Explorer 7 is also available, which is described as 'the most efficient way to deploy and manage Web-based solutions.'"
I think if a developer is working on ACID test conformity they are pretty close. Microsoft isnt even close to that point of worrying about that yet and looks like they wont ever be.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Yes you can uninstall it but it reverts everything back to IE 6.0 It worked quite well for me in Beta 2.
Of course, no one else implements all of CSS2 either. Though everyone else seems to be pretty far ahead of MSIE in that respect.
I know the Slashdot crowd will poo-poo on this release, the zealots will shout for their favorite browser, etc. And for the most part, they're right. The media seems oblivious to this, but I've stopping thinking of IE7 as a competitor to all of the other browsers. Instead, I see it as what a baseline browser that's integrated into the OS should be.
Yes, IE7 is basically where Firefox and everyone else was at years ago. Yes, it has tons of room for improvement. But for the unwashed masses out there, having a PC that comes with IE7, or being forced to upgrade as part of Windows Update is a good thing. Sure, I could install Windows from scratch, open up Write, and begin my novel. Or, if I want and need more features, I can choose from Word, Open Office, WordPerfect, etc. Same goes for the browsers. IE7 will give the average user a higher starting point, but the alternatives will always do the job better, and I don't think IE7 will stop the adoption that Firefox is seeing. Who is seriously going to go back to IE after using and customizing Firefox to how they want it?
I use Firefox at home, and partially at work, but I also have to use IE for our Intranet development (it's easier for now, and they're too ingrained to IE for me to start using FF full time. If something doesn't work right, I'd rather not have to tell the "well, it works right in FF, it's your problem"....anyway....). I grabbed the IE7b3 yesterday and have found it leaps and bounds better that IE7b2. Pages load faster (still not as fast as FF), the UI is snappier (still not as snappy as FF), and some of the quirks of before have been fixed. It's better than IE7b2, and tons better than IE6. Is it going to replace FF at all? Heck, no.
The IE 7 team has talked in length about the changes to the rendering engine and the decisions they've made.
Some particularly interesting posts are:
Standards and CSS in IE
Improving the CSS 2.1 strict parser for IE 7
Layout Complete Announced at MIX06
What's New for CSS in Beta 2 Preview
The prolog, strict mode, and XHTML in IE
All your are belong to us
Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages.
It's not perfect, but it's a major improvement in basically every way over IE 6.
It's Still Fisher-Price. :(
This dll hooks the Flight Simulator app into the Active Accessiblity API which provides features for people with disabilities. While I haven't coded to the MS platform specifically for a very long time, unless something major has changed, it wouldn't be odd at all for parts of that API to be actually buried in the innards of IE. A very annoying MS trait, that; to bury parts of their APIs all over the place. Many things can be said of MS as a development platform, most of them bad from my perspective, but one thing it most definitely isn't is orthangonal.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Repeat after me: Acid2 is not a rigorous CSS compliance test. Passing Acid2 does not mean you support every aspect of some version of CSS. It was designed to catch a number of aspects that most browsers did not support as of a year ago.
I'll agree that Opera 9 supports more of CSS2.1 than Firefox 1.5, but I believe it also supports more of CSS 2.1 than Safari 2, which also passes Acid2.
As for "Where's Netscape?" -- present-day Netscape is a fusion of IE and Firefox. It uses the IE's Trident engine on some pages and Mozilla's Gecko engine on others. Previous versions of Netscape that have enough CSS support to consider were also Gecko-based.
IE will use the W3C box model if you include an appropriate DOCTYPE in your page (as per the standards) thereby triggering "strict" rendering mode. The box model is only broken if you use"quirks" mode rendering.
This has been the case since IE5.5.
It's also how Firefox, Opera and Safari - and probably every other CSS-supporting browser of any note - cope with all the malformed HTML/CSS out there.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
But the web is supposed to be a cross-platform environment from the ground up. For the most part, I treat it that way, and just let pages look suboptimal in IE. If someone complains how a page looks in IE, I just "dumb down" the page so IE can understand how to format it better.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
According to the announcement on the IE Team's blog:
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Here's another comparison chart that includes Safari (KHTML) and Opera 9 (Presto).
Option 5: Develop to the standard while being aware of IE's limitations. Use the '* html' hack to work around these problems. Not very difficult once you know how.
Ho hum for the life of a bear
Here is what Microsoft has to say about IE 7 and the ACID test:
"...I've seen a lot of comments asking if we will pass the Acid2 browser test published by the Web Standards Project when IE7 ships. I'll go ahead and relieve the suspense by saying we will not pass this test when IE7 ships. The original Acid Test tested only the CSS 1 box model, and actually became part of the W3C CSS1 Test Suite since it was a fairly narrow test - but the Acid 2 Test covers a wide set of functionality and standards, not just from CSS2.1 and HTML 4.01, selected by the authors as a "wish list" of features they'd like to have. It's pointedly not a compliance test (emphasis added) (from the Test Guide: "Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification"). As a wish list, it is really important and useful to my team, but it isn't even intended, in my understanding, as our priority list for IE7."
I'm an I.T. Director at a large firm, and I've been eager to try deployment of Firefox to our corporate desktops. However, I've been stymied by this as there seems to be no MSI installation package for FF. Our desktop users are locked down and cannot install apps, so deploying FF via login script is not an option. I'd love to be able to push this out via GPO's, but with no MSI installer, that's more or less impossible.
Does anyone know of a good way to push installations of FF via GPO? If so, are patches also available to be pushed in this fashion? Note that if users don't have local admin privs, they aren't able to use FF's auto-update function.
Lastly, I'm sure there are various people who have cobbled together MSI's manually in some fashion. I don't think this is acceptable to us at this time, as we would prefer something "official" from Mozilla if at all possible. Third party hacks are great for home use, but we need something more or less "officially recognized" by Mozilla before I'm going to do a mass push to hundreds of desktops.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Exactly which box model bugs are you talking about? The most common one that people complain about is whether width includes padding or not. Unfortunately, despite everybody still complaining about it, Microsoft fixed that bug in 2001 when they released Internet Explorer 6.
I believe they still get error-handling wrong, which means they don't conform to CSS 1, however they have implemented the last remaining functionality of CSS 1 with Internet Explorer 7, so if you write valid CSS 1 that shouldn't be a problem.
As for CSS 3, they've added a few CSS 3 selectors.
You are wrong when you claim that Internet Explorer 7 has the same parsing bugs; for instance, they've fixed the * html and _property hacks.
None of the browsers you point to even implement HTML properly. Compliancy is obviously too much to expect from anybody.
I agree that Internet Explorer is miles behind other browsers, and I agree that it's really frustrating, but the specific claims you are making are false.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Actually, it seems to me that, in this case at least, there is a more benign explanation.
I don't think the issue is that the AA API stuff is buried in the innards of IE7. The nature of the proposed fix suggests that the AA API stuff is now being moved to the system when IE7 is iinstalled, so that all applications can share it.
Flight Simulator's version of the DLL is old and incompatible; so by moving it out of the way, FS 2004 can now access the centralized DLL.
Yeah, messy, but if anything, it's a step towards orthogonality.
Source (that also contains a brief summary of the most important fixed in IE7)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Not only are they close, but in the reflow branch Firefox passes ACID2.