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Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes to mention a review of the latest Beta release for Internet Explorer 7 on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite. From the article: "While it's not enough to make me switch from Firefox yet--I still love certain Firefox features such as inline search--it's no longer an object of ridicule either. IE 7.0 Beta 3 includes huge functional and security advantages of IE 6 and is an absolute no brainer for anyone choosing to stick with IE. If you are an IE user, head over to the Microsoft Web site and pick up IE 7.0 Beta 3 today." ZDNet has some first impressions of the release as well.
Well, to be fair (since you said 10 years or more) there was a period of time from the release of IE 4 to the release of 5.5 that it was essentially the best browser available. It's only since development basically stopped that it has been trounced so hard.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
"If you are an IE user, head over to the Microsoft Web site and pick up IE 7.0 Beta 3 today."
Except of course unless you're a web developer in which case you still need IE6 on your machine for testing those delightful CSS quirks and, as ever, you can't run two versions of IE on the same machine.
It's odd. MS's developer tools are generally pretty good but they do seem to fall down a bit for those of us who write web applications, especially given the recent rise in far more complex scripting and so on with the whole Web 2.0 buzz / AJAX thing. Oh well.
Can't wait to get my hands on tabbed browsing. It sounds really good.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I haven't tested Beta3, but without looking I can tell you that the standards support is relatively unchanged since Beta2. The CSS team for IE7 has stated, point blank, that virtually no further changes will be made to the engine on this front. A freaking catastrophe.
Why is this a nightmare? In order to avoid unnecessary workarounds MS eliminated ALL (yes, ALL) the workarounds used by client side devs to solve the core issues with regard to how MS renders CSS and HTML. This includes things like the guillotene bug (where content and images inside a floated box just disappear enitely), etc. However, THEY DIDN'T FIX ANY OF THE BUGS.
This means that we're now going to be headed back to the days when we have to render separately for different browsers, meaning XSLT is going to see a resurgence, costs are going to double, and folks are going to have to go back and recode all their existing apps so they render correctly in IE7.
Welcome to the wonderful world of IE development. By incompetent retards, for incompetent retards, led by a visionary bonobo chimp.
-rt
Or, to put it another way, as long as there was viable competition, Microsoft continually improved their browser. When Internet Explorer achieved its objective of killing the competition, Microsoft cancelled development and left it to rot. Now there is viable competition again, Microsoft is scrambling to get back in the game.
This is precisely why monopolies abusing their position to kill the competition is so harmful and why "it's a better product" is no defence.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
When a website wants you to go through a bunch of hoops like WGA to download a file there's often a very simple way around that. You can probably find the URL on FileMirrors. If it's something popular like an IE beta it'll probably be on the front page so you won't even have to search. Oh, and here's a link to IE7BETA3-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe.
People here have missed an important point: IE7 finally supports such basic CSS properties as position: fixed, min/max-width and fixes a few of the more annoying bugs; it also now supports PNG alpha transparency.
Once IE7 becomes widely adopted, we can finally start USING some of these features without worrying about them not being compatible with IE. We need to encourage people to upgrade, and if they won't upgrade to Firefox or Opera, then at least they can upgrade to IE7 and give us an easier time developing web pages.
"If he were a plant, people would roll him up and smoke him."