Apr 23
Internet Explorer 7 a few details….
2005 at 02.26 am posted by Veerle
Dave Hyatt is hard at work to get Safari through the Acid2 test. It is great that Apple understands the importance of these things. On to the topic of today and that’s Internet Explorer 7.
The development team just released some details about the upcoming beta 1 for this Summer. And yes they are thinking about us, web developers!
- Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We've actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.
- Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely. For example, we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs documented at positioniseverything.net so use of floated elements become more consistent.
Positive news indeed. But the only drawback of course is that Windows users are much slower in updating their systems then Mac users. A considerable amount of time will pass before we can drop IE 6 from our radar. But IE 5 support is getting trashed now and if it is needed they'll have to pay for it!
11served
1
Knap voor ons ontwikkelaars…
Zouden ze ook tabs standaard gaan inbouwen, als antwoord op de grote groep Firefox-overlopers?
2
Nice blog. I’ve been looking at your tutorials, but… I miss one where you show us all how to make nice icons a la duoh. :)
Keep it up!
3
have had it supported in the code for a while now
Argh..so what stopped them from slipping it into IE6?
Anyway, if they’d actually support the Acid2 test it’d be a great boon for webdevelopment as a whole.
But the only drawback of course is that Windows users are much slower in updating
Indeed, but thanks to SP2 for Win/XP windows update should be on by default now, so I’d expect IE7 to have a faster acceptance rate than earlier versions.
PS. Your previews don’t return me to my post anymore, but rather to the top of the screen. Have you been updating the blog?
4
PNG alpha channel support is really good news. Only thing i am really missing now is pseudo classes and i hope they are going to implement this as soon as possible.
I hope more dev features are coming as well. Because more than six months to bring png alpha when you consider that some weird alphaloader trick to emulate transparency were implemented a long time ago.. it is a kind of funny situation. Especially since png alpha transparency would hardly break any pages.
Now i wonder if they are going to add features to the browser or focus only on upgrading ie engine.
5
Hopefully they’ll bundle it as part of something like SP3 as a means of getting the masses up-to-date?
6
Positive news indeed. Just wish, like you said, that people would upgrade. I’ve been slowly able to get a few Windows people I work with to move to Firefox over IE, but people tend to resist change. They are too afraid they will lose something or don’t want to take a little bit of time to learn a new browser, although they aren’t complicated. We actually still have a couple people using *shudder* Netscape 4.7. How scarey is that?
7
In an ideal situation IE7 respect all of the hacks which we have been using just for IE5-6. Box models, -3 pixel shifts etc.
The one danger that many will find is the use of IE conditionals. Things like <!--[if gte IE 5.5] will have to be reworked on some sites to be more specific.
8
It’s good to see that MS will bring us the png alpha support.
But my biggest problem with IE is that we’ll have to deal with IE 5.5 and IE 6 for a long time and those version doesn’t support the png alpha…
It’s just another browser to check when came the time to validate a website .... more work for us! And IE7 will certainly come with his own css bugs too ;)
9
Sorry for my previous post in dutch (I already read english articles without noticing it :-))…
And the answer is that IE7 will have tabbedbrowsing! For the article, you can read it on Tweakers
10
Does anyone know how they will implement the new IE7 onto folks’ computers? Will be an add-on like with XP SP2 or is it going to be a thing where you have to go to the Microsoft website and download it yourself.
From what I know now, almost anyone who has windows xp has already downloaded the service pack 2 by now. So as long as they make it a requirement or a “Critical Update,” I think we can look forward to the process being a little bit quicker to go from IE6 to IE7.
11
I’m looking forward to the day when we can forget IE5. How much does everyone still worry about it? I find that there are some things that I just can’t be bothered fixing for IE5.0.
I’m glad to hear that IE7 will increase the implementation of things that have been standard for many years now. I have the feeling that there will still be a large number of features ignored though.