Submitted by At the MIX06 conference, Microsoft handed out new builds of Internet Explorer 7. They now also made it available for people who will not attend the conference. Also MIX06, Bill Gates promised more frequent updates to Internet Explorer in the future.
At the MIX06 conference, Microsoft handed out new builds of Internet Explorer 7. They now also made it available for people who will not attend the conference. Also MIX06, Bill Gates promised more frequent updates to Internet Explorer in the future.
I ran the new build through a test suite of standards that the previous IEb72 failed. It behaves no differently, regardless of DTD or server model (IIS/Apache).
Critical: it’s quicker to tell what it supports that IE6 doesn’t, than it is to enumerate the rest of the CSS2 spec every other browser supports that IE7 doesn’t. From a web developer’s perspective, it’s an incredible disappointment. Even the mistakes in HTML are the same as they were in IE5.
And according to Microsoft this is the final version of the renderer, so expect no improvements unless there’s a 7.5 release.
I was so not impressed by this beta. I hear MS is planning on 7.5 and 8 versions of IE already.
impressed by what?
It must be because Ubuntu is so popular.
Also because, Coke is getting popular in Asia Pacific.
and it is raining in Atlanta, and Nike has emplyed Robert, and Tom hanks is producing another movie …..
I know these are totally irrevent to the topic about IE, well so is you update.
IE7 isn’t a cure for cancer. It isn’t the ultimate browser. But the fact of the matter is that it can do a lot of things that its predecessors have been criticized for not having: tabbed browsing, opt-in ActiveX, zoomable pages, improved security, anti-phishing, RSS feeds, better CSS handling, etc. At least the browser market has been reenergized. Competition is good. I think we should all hope that IE continues to improve relative to Firefox, Opera, and others. We all benefit.
Most of the things you mention are cosmetic changes, what I and mostly every web developer wants is standards support. When I code to standards, pages look and behave as expected in Firefox, Safari and Opera, but IE always needs extra work.
MS finally got rid of DLL hell (for the most part), now we web devs are in browser hell. It’s been widely noted that IE7 will render pages different than IE6 (and 5.5 of course). So we now have to test:
-IE5.5
-IE6.0
-IE7.0
-FF v.All (Windows and Mac)
-Safari
-Opera (if we’re lucky enough to have the time).
This is getting ridiculous.
While it _sounds_ great on the surface that MS will be updating IE on a more consistent basis, an excellent question was asked at the MIX06 keynote about this: “When upgrades come out, will users have the option to opt out of what would otherwise be a forced upgrade, and could break sites w/o devs having had enough time to test against new versions of IE.” Hopefully MS will pay attention going forward.
I’m using it right now (downloaded it whilst eating tea), and its a big change, in the way it operates, but at the same time, I’m very impressed with the changes they’ve made – rendering is nice (for the websites I visit), fairly stable for a beta, and hopefully it’ll be released soon 🙂
it also seems to have an unbeatable bot for playing Stephen Brook’s Browser Wars… at least it feels like a bot: never looses and is always online! :p
Either that or I’ve been playing an insomniac with too much skill (for me)