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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.'"
IE 7 still did not correctly implement the box model, positioning, all CSS1, all CSS2, or any CSS3. The same IE-specific parsing bugs for CSS are in place in IE 7.
At this point, you have to ask; is it that the people at Microsoft are incapable of producing a specs-compliant rendering engine (when every one else in the world can?), that they are roped by backwards compatibility, or that they think people will see IE 6 + tabs as "good enough"?
It's to the point where every site I make has 2 code paths: not IE, and the IE-specific overrides (up to an additional 20kb per page!).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Changes to IE7's rendering engine have been primarily in fixing bugs and catching up to established standards like CSS. came out of WhatWG (or, more precisely, came out of work Apple was doing to make Dashboard widgets possible, then submitted to WhatWG), which, so far, the IE team appears to be ignoring.
Since WhatWG's work does seem to be catching on, with Opera, Firefox and Safari all implementing features and not just talking about it, there might be some pressure on Microsoft to start adding support in IE 7.5 or IE 8.
It's not perfect, but it's a major improvement in basically every way over IE 6.
Wow, seven different press releases/comments from MS. Well, someone just installed it on a test box, so let me take a look at the HTML I'm outputting. Golly looks just the same as IE6. IE fails to show either the CSS or XHTML formatting it failed to before. Now lets take a look in some other browsers. Firefox works. Opera works. Safari works.
They can talk all they want, but they still haven't managed to do anything. Talk is cheap. Luckily, as this is content that only network security experts will be looking at, nobody cares is it is unformatted for IE users since none of them would touch the bloody thing.