Article:		A First Look at IE 7
Subject:		Disappointing article, average product...
Date:		2005-08-09 18:46:45
From:		apocraphilia
Pretty clear and well illustrated article, but failing to answer just about any question I had about IE 7. Sure it's a 'first look', but why 'first look' at the tabs? I've already got a tabbed browser - I'm not impressed by that. What's the CSS support like? Quirks mode rendering? JavaScript/AJAX support? The only thing people are saying about tabs in IE is 'finally'. The real discussion is (and has always been, for IE) standards support. And not standards like RSS either - RSS in IE 7 looks faddish at best. Ignoring my personal preference - that RSS feeds belong in my messaging app not my browser (Thunderbird handles it quite well) - they better have a very slick tool to manage all the feeds people collect, or this 'feature' is going flop. Oddly, the feature I actually thought was most interesting in the article is something I never actually do - print out web pages. But it still caught my eye because it suggests that Microsoft, in this case at least, is improving a feature that a lot of people actually need. But if improved printing, RSS 'support', some 'phishy' security features and tweaked back buttons is the limit if the innovation in IE 7, it's not going to win a lot of converts.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Disappointing article, average product...
  2005-08-10 07:02:06  trollll [View]
  
  
  Agreed.
  
  As far as standards go, they've made some progress (they should have after all this time...) but still have a long way to go. Basically it looks like, along with the tabs and RSS, they implemented a list of "IE can't even do this" and completely ignored the list of full standards that it should follow.
  
  From IEBlog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx), they've fixed the following:
  

  
  
  • Peekaboo bug
  
  
  • Guillotine bug
  
  
  • Duplicate Character bug
  
  
  • Border Chaos
  
  
  • No Scroll bug
  
  
  • 3 Pixel Text Jog
  
  
  • Magic Creeping Text bug
  
  
  • Bottom Margin bug on Hover
  
  
  • Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
  
  
  • IE/Win Line-height bug
  
  
  • Double Float Margin Bug
  
  
  • Quirky Percentages in IE
  
  
  • Duplicate indent
  
  
  • Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
  
  
  • 1 px border style
  
  
  • Disappearing List-background
  
  
  • Fix width:auto
  
  

  
  
  In addition we’ve added support for the following
  

  
  
  • HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
  
  
  • Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
  
  
  • CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
  
  
  • CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
  
  
  • Alpha channel in PNG images
  
  
  • Fix :hover on all elements
  
  
  • Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body
  
  

  
  
  From my perspective, they still have a lousy browser and will cause me many headaches for years to come.
  
  But they have at least started trying, regardless of the motivation behind it. I have to give the IE developers major props for tackling this monstrosity head-on and taking every lump, criticism and outright flame that follows their posts to the community.
  
  Molly has some intense posts (start here: http://www.molly.com/2005/07/28/thats-why-its-called-beta/ and check the following posts about how much flak she got just for posting it) about the work going on between the WaSPs and the IE team. Major props to her as well...
• Oops
  2005-08-10 07:03:43  trollll [View]
  
  
  I apologize, I had no idea using an unordered list would blow up that much in the comment space...should've just used hyphens.
  
  Oh, well...