IE7 Wicked Clearing House

I’ve seen some screenshots of Vista at winsupersite.com - being first and foremost a ‘designer’ … it’s not all that impressive (compaired to Mac OS X). Maybe my expectations was too high?

To me the move to transparent window edges in Windows is bad. I had a hard time with previous versions of OSX being so white in the finder. The low contrast made it hard to distinguish windows when a lot of windows are open. Tigger takes care of a lot of that for me but Vista now takes that to the other extreme and takes away the separation between windows. As for IE7, it is a developer release only - they’ve not done anything significant for designers and we’ll unfortunately have to wait for Beta 2 (or later?) to get what we want.

To me, the transparent windows are a really bad idea. I don’t even like the default XP look, I prefer the ‘Classic’ style, it’s much smaller and streamlined.

I’m just glad it’s not spelled “Wikid.”

“Maybe my expectations was too high?”

Are you serious? It’s MS— why would you have high expectations?!

I’d love to see someone who has their hands on IE7 take a walk through the CSS Zen Garden. Unlike the acid test, which is a great way of testing everything under the sun, perhaps a site that provides lots of practical examples of CSS usage will be better at showing how IE7 will impact us as designers.

Jakob - if you have a list of CSS Zen Garden entries in mind list them and I’ll take some screenies. Though, I doubt it would do any worse than IE6. I’m not really one to judge which entries would be good examples so if you have some entries specifically in mind then I’d be happy to help.

If someone can supply me with a copy, I’ll “iCapture” it. So we can all get a sniff of Micros**t’s new offerings.

Hmm, well, Oxton has a few IE6 jogs he adjusted: csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/122/122.css

and I remember Elastic Lawn made use of height/clip as a way of hiding elements instead of display: none csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/063/063.css

Those are the two off the top of my head that made me think about some IE6 specific tweaks in the CSS. For those keeping score on IE Blog, Beta 2 is going to make a lot of people smile. I’m sure we are going to revisit these posts on the next beta, especially if everything they mention is truly going to be addressed.

Ref IEBlog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx

Well, Jakob, the two urls you listed only exhibited one bug. On the first one you listed, http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/122/122.css, I noticed that the top menu, the Designs menu, showed list bullets out to the left, almost aligned with the left edge of the Designs header.

Oops, forgot the screenshot -> Zen Garden Screenie

By accident I stumbled on the iCab 3 beta, that was a major improvement on CSS and DOM issues, when compared to all iCab 2.x versions.

Only problem with IE7 beta that it is a installer an download restricted to XP, but maybe WIN 2000 could be option too, see this post: http://www.snook.ca/archives/000390.html

How many people will start using IE7 and upgrade, this is still future talk. Problem is that it needs some time to see the real improvement: Testers consist of developers and end-users.

Also gladly we have IE conditional comments that can be handy to differentiate between the IE versions.

A small addition to people hat have need for installing this IE7beta, this is a handy comment.

http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/07/28/ie7_css_upda/comments/#c012110

My thoughts:

reading through the responses I have come up with this summation:

• GUI Users and those looking at it from this perspective have for the most part gushed over it
• Developers looking at it from a Web Development viewpoint have (rightly) trashed it’s poor development of standards and CSS from it’s parent IE6

I just hope they try more on this and less on the pretty side of things for a (hopefully atleast) second beta…

I’ve seen the list of CSS bugs that IE7 has apparently fixed. But happens to all the ‘hacks/fixes’ that have been used to counteract IE’s crappyness in the past?

IE. Double-Float Margin… I usually specify half the margin for IE, then use html>body div#box to put in the real margin for everything else…

Will things like this work in IE7? Its gonna get tricky if it doesnt!

I’m really hoping that IE7 will, for the most part, act like Firefox (if they’re fixing everything they say they it probably will)… if that happens I’ll be very happy since the few hacks that I have used will still be valid for earlier versions of IE.

I’m now actually hoping that IE6 forever is left alone so we don’t have to put on a scramble for that one…

I love tabs. I use Firefox and I can’t imagine living without them.

But i think MS need to create something better than tabs in the browser. We already have tabs on the taskbar. Having 2 sets of tabs that work differently makes no usability sense. I think the taskbar should be improved/enhanced to accomodate tabs in any program.