Living with Internet Explorer 7
First, let me say that Internet Explorer 7 is much better than I thought it would be. Pages render a lot more consistently than the older versions of Internet Explorer. It feels faster and more reliable. The interface is less cluttered and a lot cleaner. Our websites now render a lot more consistently across the browsers, requiring far less 'tweaks' - more on that in a minute. So far, so good. They've done a good job.
But... It's not finished. During it's development, I have been reading the Microsoft blogs, and when they released it, that was a stable version of the application, but the rendering engine itself wasn't finished. Now, for a web browser, that seems a wrong. Surely the rendering engine is the core part of any web browser. I'm not the only one that thinks this am I? I'll admit, the one in it is light years ahead of the older versions, but to admit that it's not finished and yet still release it detracts from it being a final release.
Then there's the interface. I know I just said that I prefer it, but one thing does niggle me a bit... The stop button! In an ideal world, you wouldn't need to use it, but there are still those dodgy little websites that you need the ability to stop from rendering. So why, oh why is it such a small button that took two of us 5 minutes to spot, tucked away next to the address bar. Personally, I want a nice big 'STOP' button, right next to the navigation buttons. Why? Because that's what we're all used to now. It's how every other browser does it, and IE always has. So, if it ain't broke, why move it?
As for CSS compliance, I'm relieved that most of our code works fine in Explorer 7, but there is still the need for the occassional work around (or CSS Hack as we've come to know it. A really nice way to make styles specific to Internet Explorer 6 was to use the following notation before a class:
*html* [classname] {}
This has worked brilliantly, and meant that I've not needed to use javascript browser detection to load in additional stylesheets. But, Internet Explorer 7 picks up this fix, and means that pages that were ok pick up the fix and then look wrong. But thankfully, there is a fix to target IE 7 only:
*+html [classname] {}
Phew... Got there in the end. I am reasonably happy with Internet Explorer 7 though, although I haven't yet taken the plunge of installing it fully. Instead, I'm using a little application I found that allows you to run Explorer 6 and 7 side by side. However, there is a second approach that allows you to install Internet Explorer 7, and run Explorer 6 as a 'standalone' application. Details can be found on The Future of the Web.
I hope that this new standards compliance is something that will carry on withing Microsoft. Well done on a fine browser, just please finish it soon for all of us web developers out there still tearing our hair out.
Links
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 blog
The Future of the Web
Gregory Brine
