Ready or not, here I(E7) come(s)

Aug 23 ’06

Whether or not you're ready for it, IE7 is coming. And it's coming soon. It's coming as an automatic update, although the IE7 blog folks have been a little shy about specifying a date.

This is great news!

Wait a minute. Let's try that again.

This should be great news!

The IE7 blog posted today about all of the CSS rendering bugs that they've fixed. The list is extensive, including almost all of the problems from positioniseverything.net. Notice that I say almost. The float clearing bug is still a bug in IE7. It seems so strange to me — they can squash all of the bugs but one? That's like running the 100 yard dash and stopping at yard 98. Why can't they seem to do what every other major browser developer has done? Is Microsoft so incompetent that they can't even toe the line anymore? So much for being the largest, richest, most powerful corporation in the computer industry.

The impending mass adoption (because of the automatic update) of IE7, with is myriad bug fixes should make every web designer jump for joy, but alas it's a mixed bag, because IE7 falls a little short of expectations. On the fateful day that IE7 rolls out, our sites will have to be instanteously compatible. Thankfully, for the most part they will. But be warned if you've ever used float clearing to make a layout work!

At least there will still be ways to target IE7, despite the fixing of the Holly hack, * html hack, etc. by the IE7 dev team. Not only have new hacks been discovered, which I won't comment on, but it's easy enough to put all IE7-directed CSS into a single file, and use conditional comments to target that file to IE7 alone.

My point, however, is that we shouldn't have to. IE7 should just render the standard which Microsoft, as a member of the W3C, helped create. Just like everybody else.

Before I convince people that I'm just a cynical reflexive MS critic, I have to say that they've done quite a bit more than I thought they would. I mean, they made it to yard 98. I honestly didn't think that the initial release of IE7 would get that far in the race for standards compliance. Kudos to the IE7 dev team for that.

For an interesting discussion about what people think, look at the conversation on Dave Shea's post in the comments.