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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.'"
Thank God, no!
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.
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.
It is a step, but it is very questionable if it is a good thing to make a step when they are still so far of the target of rendering common CSS constructs that all other browsers render without problem.
(I do not mean the ACID2 test!)
Now we will have yet another browser to make special exceptions for, different from IE5 and IE6, and we still cannot feed IE7 the same CSS as Firefox, Opera or Konqueror.
That is a step, but is it the right direction? I don't know.
I couldn't find links to this page in the summary or IE7 blog entry, so I'm posting it here as I believe many would be interested in it: List of CSS changes in IE7.
:hover for all elements, implementing position: fixed, PNG transparency support, and min/max width/height.
It's mostly bug fixes, notable new features are enabling
python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
It still pisses me off that IE doesn't support the BLINK tag. What a bunch of crap, MS. :\
Anonymous Cowards are at -6...
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...
This is not the same IE build as in the latest Vista build. This release only works in XP. Actually the versions of IE in XP and Vista are not exactly the same. Some of this they blame on the underlying OS but most likely it's just to make vista more attractive.
IE for Vista was going to be named IE7+ and XP simply IE7, however they scrapped that naming convention.
Also another slight name change, on both platforms it's no longer "Microsoft Internet Explorer" it's now "Windows Internet Explorer".
PNG files with gamma=1/2.2 are still rendered differently from PNG files with the sRGB chunk
and from untagged images. See http://pmt.sf.net/gamma_test where the 1/2.2 patches
should match and the 1/1.96 patches should be lighter (use Firefox or almost any other
browser to see how the page should be rendered).
You left out the part where WGA gets installed automagically during the IE7 install, even if you uncheck the box for "check for updates" at the beginning of the install.
I watched that happen on one of my boxes at home- unplugged the cat5, and the install claimed it couldnt finish without internet connection. And that's after you go through the validation process just so you can download IE7 from MS.
Be warned- if you don't want WGA, be careful trying to install IE7.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The popularity of IE7 cannot be stopped because it's bundled with Windows and made available through Windows Update web site which almost every Windows user frequents, knowningly or not. Therefore the browser doesn't have to be popular because it will be widely used regardless.
I've been a Firefox-only Windows user for years however if IE7 supports many of the features I like about Firefox, I will have no qualms using it instead. I want the Web, not a browser. The ACID tests are important for standards, but we know Microsoft usually doesn't adhere fully to standards that aren't their own, so it's no a surprise. With IE7 Microsoft seems to be adhering to the 80/20 rule -- in this case 80% of what the better brwosers have become with 20% of the effort expended. This is smart business practice despite the other aspects.
Microsoft has copied popular features introduced by other browsers (as they have done from each other). I know we're going to see less Firefox on Windows when IE7 is published to Windows update. Most users don't care for the ACID tests (only the developers). It's amazing the dominance the old IE browser still has even though Microsoft hasn't updated it in years. It's inevitable that IE7 will make big wave and grab back a large % of browser share with its copied features.
I'm quite sure it won't pass ACID2, but that doesn't matter - CSS support is still pretty good in MSIE 7 RC 1 and that's more that I hoped for. I just had to port quite complex CSS layout for MSIE 7 (used position:fixed hacks in MSIE 6, maxwidth emulation and whatnot) and all it took was to change one conditional comment (to ensure that these many MSIE-6-workarounds won't be applied to MSIE 7). Now I'm using exactly the same stylesheet for Mozilla, Opera and MSIE 7.
Underscore hacks won't do the trick for MSIE 7 (which is probably good thing), pages with xml declaration are rendered in standards mode (which will cause some minor trouble, mainly because of that boxmodel change).
You can download nightly builds of Firefox from the trunk (branded as Minefield to indicate use at your own risk) so you can see exactly how Firefox 3.0 is progressing. As for IE8 we can't see the current status of that so who knows how much work is left to be done on IE8?
For updates on thr trunk (which will become Fx3.0) see The Burning Edge
I still can't believe MS won't allow you to move some of the features around, notably the home button. It is unbeliveable awkward to go to the top left to go back and forward and then have to move way down and right to get to the home page button. You want to put all of those other little buttons off to the bottom right? Fine. But move the fucking home button back next to the navigation arrows where it is supposed to go. Oh and smart move to hide the file menu and all the other menus. Nobody uses those menus anyway.
Pluses?
Tabbed browing - Welcome to the 90s.
Shrink to fit printing - Gee why would we need that? I like having 15% of every page I print cut off.
RSS Feeds - Does anyone even use this?
Integrated Search - About time.
Overall I think this is the browser that MS should have released 3-4 years ago. It is better than IE 6 in pretty much every way but I don't see Opera or Firefox users coming back anytime soon. I know that MS sees these changes as a big deal but I honestly expected more from a company that spends $1 Billion+ on R&D per year. With all of that money and talent the best they could do is copy features that other browsers have had for years and years? Talk about a total lack of innovation.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Web developers can use conditional comments to target a specific version of IE, and here is an article that goes into the details of what hacks are "supported" by IE7.
Supporting IE7 will require some extra work by webdevs, but it's doable even if code already contains hacks for previous versions of IE.
python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
> 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. )
I actually haven't been reading that at all.
Most of the reviews I've read chide MS for creating an interface that looks far, far different than anything else in the OS.
The average person does NOT like MS's new interface design. For the most part, there is a huge majority of people who run XP in "classic" mode, enjoying all applications in a one-size-fits all, boxy, ugly as sin, tan/grey everything Windows 2000-style interface. In particular, placing tabs above the menu bar seems to incite hatred; people find it confusing.
Joe Blow doesn't like UI changes; even if they could potentially increase efficency. The only people that are really moved by whiz-bang UIs are young gamers and UI engineers.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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.
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