IE7 Wicked Clearing House
Just a short Wicked post to try to keep track of developments about the recently released IE7 beta. Feel free to add links to commentary and reviews.
Formal(-ish) Announcements
- Windows Vista & IE5 Beta 1 Available
- MSDN: What’s New in Internet Explorer 7
- Microsoft: Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 Technical Overview
- IEBlog : Standards and CSS in IE
- About adding search engines to IE
Community Reactions
- mezzoblue: IE7 CSS Updates
- Andy Rondeau: A Review of IE 7 Beta 1
- Joe Clark: IE7: The Saga Begins
- Molly.com: That’s why it’s Called Beta
- Receptacle: IE7 Beta: First Impressions
- KuraFire: IE7 beta 1 release
- snook.ca: Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 Released
- Robert Nyman: IE 7 beta 1 - a first glance
- Hayo Bethlehem: IE7 beta redux
- Rijsdam.nl: On Internet Explorer 7
- Anne van Kesteren: IE7 Beta 1
- LeftBrain/RightBrain: IE7 Developer Beta Released
- Slashdot: IE7 Bugs and reviews
- Flexbeta: Inside Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1
- ZDnet: Internet Explorer 7 Beta: a first look
- Tom-Eric: IE7 impressions
- The Register: IE7 nukes Google, Yahoo! search
- Scobleizer :Response to the above Register article
- Kim Siever: IE7 Beta 1
- Information Week: Microsoft Releases Limited Beta Of IE7 For Windows XP
- The Gippy Pages: IE 7: this is a little disappointing
- IE7 Beta 1 and Standards
- QuirksBlog: IE 7: Three cheers for Molly Holzschlag and Chris Wilson
- Molly.com: Standards, Me, and IE
- staticreality: IE7 beta
- CNET Review
- Keep an Open Eye: Microsoft: Breaking Trust With Web Developers ?
- IE7 Beta: First Impressions
- Suck it Does: Next Topic
- IE7 Beta: The Annoyances
- Implications of IE7 Beta
- WindowsITPro: IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch
- Better Living Through Software
- Internet Explorer 7: (a developers%uFFFD - Somethins strange here view lol
018 Comments
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?!
Drop it Ed. MS-bashing is boring. That goes for all of you glare
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:
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.