Users and Web Developers Vent Over IE7

Spinlock_1977 writes "ComputerWorld is running a story about developers frustration with IE 7, and Microsoft's upcoming plans (or lack thereof) for it. From the article, "But the most pointed comment came from someone labeled only as dk. You all continue to underestimate the dramatic spillover effect this poor developer experience has had and will continue to have on your other products and services. Let me drive this point home. I am a front-end programmer and a co-founder of a start-up. I can tell you categorically that my team won't download and play with Silverlight ... won't build a Live widget ... won't consider any Microsoft search or ad products in the future.""

Comments

CSS support

[gihan_ripper]

Finally IE7 supports transparent PNGs, but CSS support is still poor at best. Here's a table that lists support of various CSS styles on a per-browser basis. IE doesn't look good.

Using IE7 sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to develop for IE7 (indeed, most of the time I just try and make sure my websites look alright in the various Linux based browsers I have around, including Lynx fo course). But I've had to use it a lot in the last couple of weeks.

I hate it. There are little things, such as having to tab twice to get from the address bar to the search bar (in Firefox it is only once...), re-arranging all of the buttons (the back and forward buttons are too far away now, the refresh and stop buttons are too small and in an inconvinient place etc.), lack of spell checker (as you can probably tell from my nasty spelling in this post) and other simple UI issuse like those.

As well, often I've noticed that it will freeze the rendering of a page for no apparent reason, or blur the page, so that you can't actually see anything at all... for a time.

This is not to mention the inability to save a page by right clicking it (useful when Javascript hides the menu bar), the persistent attempt at getting me to save pages in "WebArchive" format (MHT), no matter how many times I select something else, and various other things.

Another thing! It refuses to let me go directly to a secure website that has been signed by itself (and not be a 'signing authority')! Again, no matter how many times I go to the website it throws up the same stupid page, we reccomend that you don't go to this website... BUT I HAVE TO TO DO X (check email, whatever).

In short, I've noticed few good things about IE7 as a user (the addition of tabs and the search bar are the only two things), and many bad things.
As a developer, I shall continue to ignore IE unless I happen across a copy of the browser while I'm actually thinking about developing.

Re:Parent has a halfway decent point

[Osty]

Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.

This is absolutely not true. IE has had debugger hooks since forever (at least IE4, which is the earliest IE that mattered). You simply need an external debugger in order to use them. Visual Studio works great, but you can use one of the free Express versions like Visual Web Developer Express, or you can use the archaic Microsoft Script Debugger. Enabling debugging does require poking around in the Tools -> Options Advanced tab to flip the counter-intuitively named "Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)" to off (yes, the checkbox is a negative, so when it's checked debugging is disabled and when it's unchecked debugging is enabled). Once you've done that, you can attach your debugger to the iexplore.exe process or you can use the new debugger-related options in the "View" menu to attach, break, etc (may have to restart IE for those menu options to show up), or you can just wait for something to break and present with you a "do you want to debug?" prompt.

While hooking a debugger to IE is not quite as simple as it is in Firefox (install Firebug, you're done), it does allow you to work in a familiar interface (assuming you're familiar with Visual Studio, of course) and is sufficiently powerful. Couple that with the IE Developer Toolbar for DOM inspection and Fiddler for session inspection and you have all of the tools you need to debug even the largest of web applications. When you're done, don't forget to Drip for memory leaks.

The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.

Not directly to HTML, but Microsoft was responsible for creating XMLHTTP, the precursor to XMLHttpRequest, without which the whole "web2.0" "AJAXy" stuff wouldn't exist. I believe XMLHttpRequest is now a w3c standard, which never would've happened if not for XMLHTTP (and yes, IE7 finally does support a native XMLHttpRequest object so you don't have to have branches for XHR vs. XMLHTTP if you don't care about supporting IE6). Similarly, there would be no SVG if it weren't for VML (not to be confused with VRML). Saying that marquee is the best Microsoft's ever been able to contribute to the web is very, very shortsighted.