IE7 Compatibility a Developer Nightmare

yavori writes "Internet Explorer 7 has kicked in at last on all MS Windows OS running PCs because of the fact M$ decided to force it's users to migrate through update. In fact this has started a IE7 Web Developers Nightmare. The article actually explains that most of the small company B2C sites may just fall from grace because of IE7 incompatibility. One of the coolest thing IE7 is unable to do is actually processing form data when clicked on an INPUT field of TYPE IMG... which is pretty uncool for those using entire payment processes with such INPUT fields."

Comments

I've had the exact opposite experience

[nhavar]

We have a webapp that was built for our call centers. It started out in IE 4 and then later we did some updates for IE5. IE6 came out and there were a few JavaScript things to fix-up (nothing huge) but by then we had ditched almost all of the non-standard code and moved from table layout to pure CSS layout. When IE7 came out we didn't need to make a single change to the JavaScript, CSS, or HTML. All 200+ pages just work.

Everyone was worried that because of our choices and how heavily we rely on CSS and JavaScript that we would be in for a nightmare. Luckily, not so. However, two of the products we purchased for time tracking and for defect reporting both DIE because they have user agent checks built into their javascript. When they run into the unknown IE7 string they just chirp back a warning message and don't even try to load up. How many times do web developers need to be told "browser detection is bad use object/feature detection" before they'll get it.

I don't think that I've had any problem with any of the normal sites that I use when using IE7 over the last couple of months (banking, news, mail, social). I get the feeling that the author of this article just doesn't know what he's talking about.