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IE 7, beta 1 - first details

Published on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005

Ok, trying something new here. Two(!) posts, albeit shorter than the usual ones. I though I’d try and sometimes write the normal slightly longer posts, and some days, shorter ones with important links. Please let me know what you think about this!

So… On to the topic in the heading:
The team behind IE have the IE blog where they periodically write about the development of IE. Chris Wilson tries to address the big focus issues like upcoming standards support in version 7 of IE. I think he’s doing a commendable job so far, and it is very important that they gain the same relation with developers as the Mozilla team and Dave Hyatt developing Safari have.

Last Friday, Chris disclosed the first real details about the upcoming version. First, they will support the alpha channel in PNG images. Second, they will address CSS bugs, and the ones declared fixed are the peekabo bug and the guillotine bug.

Great, but still obvious that they had to do it. Also, it’s just a small small part of what they have to do.
But they seem to be on the right track, I hope they don’t stray from it and that they continue be as open as Chris has about what’s going on.

Posted in Web browsers | 6 comments

6 comments

Tommy Olsson
April 26th, 2005 at 10:35

Of course Microsoft wouldn’t have bothered with any of this unless they’d started to perceive Firefox as a threat. Regardless of what one may think of Firefox per se, this is a good indication that competition is healthy and monopoly is detrimental, IMHO.

The fixes mentioned so far is not enough to persuade me to go back to using Internet Explorer, though.

With all the hype about IE7, we, as web designers and developers, also need to remember that there will still be huge numbers of users with IE6 and even IE5 for the foreseeable future. The worst-case scenario is that they fix some things in IE7 and make it impossible to differentiate between IE6 and IE7 with our CSS hacks. Then we will have to decide which one to support, and end users will suffer.
Robert - author
April 26th, 2005 at 10:45

Tommy,

Yes, the impact of competitors has been good, and the ideal scenario would be maybe 3-4 web browsers with equal share of the market.

Of course these fixes aren’t reason enough to go back for me neither, but at least I believe it shows some initiative for making it better.

Ideally, I’d recommend not using CSS hacks at all, so that shouldn’t be a problem. I prefer using conditional comments for serving IE its specific styles, which shouldn’t generate problem in the future either.
Roger Johansson
April 26th, 2005 at 18:37

They can fix up IE all they want. Even if it’s way ahead of all other browsers I won’t be using it until they also make a Mac version ;-).
Robert - author
April 26th, 2005 at 20:01

Ha ha!
When hell freezes over then, I guess!

Seriously, though, it’s very interesting what they will make of it, since it is, and will be, a big part of our foreseeable future.
Patrik Wilhelmsson
April 27th, 2005 at 10:33

They can fix up IE all they want. Even if itâ€™s way ahead of all other browsers I wonâ€™t be using it until they also make a Mac version

I concur.
Robert - author
April 27th, 2005 at 10:50

My hope and goal is that inexperienced (as well as experienced) IE users will get a capable web browser that will open up the possibilities for web development.

As for Mac users switching OSes just for a new version of IE, that’s not likely to happen (and Safari and Firefox already have two good options for Mac users).

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