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So, despite some retractions and an updated post from Paul Thurrott, I still have this burning question: “Why do we need Internet Explorer 7?” The major reason for the release, according to Bill Gates keynote and the IE Blog is security, security, security. But they keep responding to questions about standards by saying they’re working very hard on the problem.
A while back I reposted some statistical analysis that showed that IE7 was only 2% above IE6 for CSS2 compatibility. Microsoft won’t give a number but has claimed these numbers are flawed. However, they’ve been going around to major sites and informing them that their sites are broken in IE7 because of IE6 hacks…
The IE team has long been warning against using IE hacks and suggested conditional comments instead. I heeded that warning, and am glad I did. IE7 is breaking websites. Which begs the question, if IE7 fixed all of those bugs and brought the rendering engine up to standards compliance, wouldn’t it ignore the invalid code just like all the other browsers do? The fact that it doesn’t makes me wonder why we have yet another Internet Explorer release that we have to design around. We know 6 is going to stick around for a while, now we have to hack for 6 and a little bit more for 7. And separate the hacks. The only shining light I can see is conditional comments, which have thankfully been around since 5.5.
There was a comment in February on the IE7 announcement on the IE Blog that said that maybe this release would finally “shut all those Firefox users up”. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Besides some MAJOR design flaws in the interface, IE7 has little more to offer and much to be desired. I’ll stick with FF for now. Besides, I spend 90% of my time on a mac, where I don’t even have the option of using IE. Just the trauma of designing for it. 
Ugh, I couldn’t agree more. While there are a few features that I am looking forward too (Alpha channel support on PNG’s - FINALLY!), it is a very bad sign when Microsoft is going to publicly release a broswer and they tell designers/developers to “Download the Beta’s so you can fix your webpages for IE7”.
Microsoft made a profit of 40 billion dollars in 2005, they can’t hire a few more people so they have a standards team for IE7 and a security team for IE7???
[…] A recent post on the IE Blog seemed hopeful. They’ve made a lot of fixes recently. But reports from beta testers, found in the comments of the post, were discouraging, as what IE claimed to have fixed was still erratic and fundamentally broken, and there are still major parts of the CSS1 spec that are ignored, while they are trying to incorporate the CSS2 spec. You can’t build a house without a foundation… it’s no wonder it’s breaking sites. Here’s a list of top issues reported by Tino Zijdel. […]
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