Foliosus

Many of the leading luminaries of modern standards-based web design have been very excited about the upcoming release of IE7; the promise of not having to support yet another crappy browser has been very tempting.

Let’s recap what’s happened, though.

1. MSFT announces that known hacks won’t work, and that developers should rely on conditional comments to target IE. At this point, I thought, “Oh no, here we go. They’re going to prevent us from targeting IE7, and IE7 won’t actually render things properly, so we’ll be left out to hang.”
2. MSFT makes progress, best illustrated by Molly Holzschlag’s recap of IE7’s rendering progress (including the rendering of Malarkey’s site). I’ll admit, with the latest release of IE7 beta 2, I thought there was light at the end of the tunnel. Removing the ability to specifically target IE7 isn’t a problem as long as it renders according to the standards.
3. Roger Johansson points out that the latest IE7 beta, the so-called “layout complete” version, doesn’t clear floats properly! Check the comments if you want to see some vitriol.
4. Nick Rigby points out that the “layout complete” IE7 only fixes 6 of the 7 bugs in his IE7 test suite.

So, essentially, IE7 is still going to be a broken browser, but without hacks we’ll have no way to target it. Wasn’t the whole point to have an IE browser that didn’t need special support? Thanks, Microsoft, you’re doing a bang-up job spending lots of money to make lots of headaches.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 10:56 am and is filed under Browsers, CSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.