Submitted by “We are currently locking down IE7 for shipping and I wanted to give an update on the CSS work that went into IE7. Chris originally outlined our plans for IE7, and we listened to a lot of feedback to help us address the most grievous bugs and prioritize which features to put in for IE7. I like to thank especially the contributors on this blog for their participation. Your feedback made a difference in deciding what issues to address.”
As a web developer, from what I’ve seen of it, IE 7 is just some more polishing of an old turd.
In my opinion, until Microsoft makes their browser at least as standards compliant as Firefox and Opera, it will always remain a piece of junk.
Did you actually read the blog entry? They fixed a number of bugs and if they actually fixed these bugs listed here: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html then IE7 will be a lot more standards-compliant. It won’t be “an old turd” anymore. It might be a serious competitor for other browsers actually.
I agree and I would add that Firefox is piece of junk (just not as big as IE) until it is at least as standards compilant as Opera.
Firefox is far from Opera and ACID-2, so please don’t give them credits for that part (standards). Some other stuff – yes, they’re great (great extensions, etc), but standards compilance is not FF’s biggest strength.
Having said that, IE is really bad. Hopefully MS will continue work on IE after IE7 is RTM.
There’s more to CSS than ACID-2 (lots more, in fact). Currently, Firefox is still the heavyweight as far as standards compliance is concerned. Educate yourself before calling it crap when compared to Opera:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.php?uas=IE6-IE7-FX…
No it is not. Firefox is far from standard complient. Safari, Konqueror and Opera all have a better track record in this area.
Firefox has the most features (new Javascript, Mozilla specific DOM extension etc), but most of those are not standards.
In other word Firefox is the closest the Open Source has to IE!
Btw. your link is one of my least favorite links on Standard conformance because it lacks any credibility of neutrality. It lists all kinds of bugs for Opera, but “forgets” to mention all the wellknown Firefox bugs.
In many cases it labels the firefox behavior as the correct one and Opera as the wrong, when both could be interpreted as right or both are in fact wrong. As browser developer and CSS expert the whole site just screams Firefox bias.
Edited 2006-08-25 11:21
Regardless, Opera is not the standards panacea that the OP was calling it. There’s considerable disagreement as to who is the most standards compliant browser out there, but everybody agrees that no browser is 100% compliant. Most information available from those compiling browser statistics, though, tends to rank Firefox first in standards compliance, with Opera and KHTML/WebKit just behind.
Regardless, Firefox is hardly “junk”, as the OP maintained. If anything, it’s only slightly better or worse than Opera/Safari/Konqueror.
Judging by your comment, I doubt you are a web developer.
Go back under your bridge until you actually have something to say.
It’s getting there. I’m they fixed the min-height / min-width bug though. What a PITA that was.
I downloaded the RC1 and it gets allot further along in the install than the beta’s did, crypto services is the breaking point.
Oh well, I still have trust worthy FF
Good going! I’d be happy if I could get a reliable IE6 install on wine :@ And I’m only trying to install the poxy thing because many applications won’t run without it (the native IE they’re working on is still pretty patchy).
I had been slowly collectiong IE bugs so I could code hacks to fix them on my site, but I didn’t realize that http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html has them all collected right there. I’m amazed that it was a Microsoft source that drew my attention to it.
We understand that we are far from being done and we know we have still a lot of work ahead of us.
I am also pleasantly surprised at the attitude displayed here. It is a good and right attitude. Everyone benefits when everyone follows the standards, and it looks like Microsoft understands this.
I look forward to a day when you can just code to the standard and not care what browser someone may use. What a day!
At least my sites under IE7 won’t puke on the PNGs.
Millions of if(ie7) code checks to do even the most basic DHTML. Thanks MS.
When did DHTML not require browser checks, wrapper functions, and function overloading?
Don’t get me wrong, IE7 still makes me chew my nails, but I don’t remember this halcyon era of one-code-works-everywhere interactive CSS/JavaScript.
“””We understand that we are far from being done and we know we have still a lot of work ahead of us. IE 7 is a stepping stone in our effort to improve our standards compliance”””
My, it sounds like they’ve been working hard on this. Implementing all these standards is hard, slow, tedious, difficult work.
But I have to wonder, just hypothetically you understand, if things could be expedited just a touch if they worked just a *little* bit harder.
Let’s imagine (indulge me, please) that Microsoft saw a sure way to gain a complete lock on the entire cell phone OS market, but in order to do so they had to implement all of these standards in IE properly by this Christmas.
I’ll bet we’d not be seeing blog entries about how hard they’re working, how they realize that there is still a long way to go, and how the next release is a “stepping stone” on the way to compliance.
And I’ll bet that IE would have all the requisite standards implemented by Christmas.
Just guessing here, but I suspect that Microsoft Corp. has at least slightly more resources to draw upon than does Opera Software ASA.
Edited 2006-08-24 22:07
You forget about the law of diminishing returns.
You could toss more developers into the IE7 team, and end up with even less work getting done.
Mind you, AFAIK, not evem Mozilla/Firefox/Opera is FULLY standards compliant, and they also render some CSS based stuff in a weird way that requires really convoluted interpretations of the CSS recommendations.
And we can’t forget that the CSS recommendations are often unclear enough that you can end up with wildly different interpretations about wth they mean.
Does this mean they still haven’t put transparencies in PNGs? How hard is it?
“All this work (with the exception of transparent PNGs)”
I’m glad they’ve fixed some of the other things, and it’s about time honestly, they’ve been lagging behind pretty severely.
I think they’ve still taken the easy way out and just fixed the more ‘annoying’ quirks that should of been fixed long ago, so it’s still going to have heaps of quirks, it’s just they will need to be learnt instead of the current bugs.
“All this work (with the exception of transparent PNGs)”
The quote is “All this work (with the exception of transparent PNGs) has been done under the <!DOCTYPE> switch only, since all changes required behavioral updates to be more in line what the CSS spec specifies.”
What he means is that transparent PNGs work regardless of the <!DOCTYPE> tag.
IE7 does support transparent PNGs.
Note that one of the features under “Added new features from CSS2.1” is “Alpha channel PNG support (Not a CSS feature but too important for designers to not call it out)”
Edited 2006-08-24 23:10
Its time for web developers to report any w3 validated code in ie7 that doest work correctly in ie7 as a BUG because that what it is a BUG and all other browser on the market class these errors as BUGS! They are happy to told about these errors so they can try and do something about them in due course. Get you act together Microsoft and start becomming interopable with with world not just yourselfs and your parterns.