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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.
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...
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
> 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 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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