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.'"

Comments

Re:backwards compatibility

[pe1chl]

The site at work (http://www.uw.nl/) outputs standard html/css to everyone, and uses "IE conditional comments" to feed IE5 and IE6 specialized CSS items to work around their bugs.
A workaround sheet for IE7 has not yet been written, but it is very apparent (at least in beta3) that it is not up to the quality in standard CSS handling that the other browsers (Opera, Firefox, Konqueror) are. There are still positioning and stacking bugs.

I hope they fix them before release, but I'm afraid they won't. So this will introduce yet another class of broken browser workarounds: not as broken as IE6, but still broken.

Re:CSS = ACID?

[FST777]

I design websites and webapps for a living, and all I ever have to do is design it so that it works in Firefox (ie: stick to the standards mostly) and then make sure it works in IE6 without using browser-detects (ie: use functionality detects). I have yet to come across a situation where the result doesn't work in IE7.

IE7 is an improvement, and I'm glad I have not been stupid enough in the past to use browser-detects. That is the sort of crap that keeps coming back to you with every new major version of any browser.