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Internet Explorer 7 RC1 Released
Kawahee writes "Microsoft, in conjunction with the announcement that they have finished Windows Vista RC1 have released Internet Explorer 7 RC1. Further commentary from the IE Blog post: 'The RC1 build includes improvements in performance, stability, security, and application compatibility. You may not notice many visible changes from the Beta 3 release; all we did was listen to your feedback, fix bugs that you reported, and make final adjustments to our CSS support.'"
I'm really curious to see what kind of CSS modifications I'll have to make to support IE7 vs. Firefox. There are a number of well known hacks for IE6 and it'll be interesting to see how people keep those in place without jeopardizing the layouts in IE7.
No, they said from the beginning that IE7 would not pass the ACID2 test. Maybe in a later release.
They neglected the browser for years (not the IE devs fault but management decision) so it'll take a long time to get upto speed with the rest.
One thing that we must make sure NEVER happens is that IE gets as dominant as it was pre-Firefox otherwise they'll just stop IE development again. It's happened once, it can just happen again. Fortunately, despite the hard work of the IE team, there's still a lot of benefits to be gained from using Firefox or Opera (or Safari, etc)
Apparently they've already written the roadmap for the next two versions of IE (probably called 7.5 and 8.0) so they're probably going to just make security patches for 7.0 and then fix bugs, improve compliance and add features in the future releases.
Not much as been said on these future releases yet except that they're hard at work on them.
Firefox 2.0 won't pass the Acid test because the rendering engine in 2.0 is based on the same gecko as 1.5 (1.5 uses Gecko 1.8 and 2.0 uses 1.8.1), however Firefox 3.0 should pass the acid test because a lot of work has been done on the rendering engine (Gecko 1.9).
Basically most of the changes in Firefox 2.0 will be in the frontend, 3.0 will have a lot of improvements to the backend.
However, 2.0's CSS support is vastly superior to that in IE7.
IE7 RC1 makes more than enough white-space in the beta /. discussion system.
http://img396.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ndsyn9.jp g
my eyes hurt...
> Yes, and Internet Explorer 8 should also pass the test
Really? That is huge news. Do you have ANY proof for that?
About Firefox passing the ACID2 with version 3, here is a screenshot what it looks like in the reflow branch (branch where there is a lot of work done with the CSS support, which will at some point most likely be merged with the Firefox 3 trunk branch). That is why we bulieve that Firefox 3 will pass the ACID2:
http://www.nelchael.net/varia/fireflowfox.png
( For those of you who don't like clicking links or can't see images. There is a screenshot of Firefox browser, ACID2 page open and I see no errors with it. )