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IE7 Now or Never

After a year and a half in development Internet Explorer 7 has been unleashed on the world. Well not exactly the world as apparently only English versions are available at the moment. It looks like it will be rolled out by automatic update in a few weeks time, so soon everybody will have it - or will they?

Hopefully the latest version if IE will be much better than previous offerings and nightmares over floats and the box model will be forgotten forever. From my tests with IE7 RC1 its certainly better then before and there are some useful improvements. Tabs have arrived and there is an interesting RSS reader built in, but disappointingly the security alerts have already started.

For me the biggest question is whether to install now or wait. It’s better, but it still doesn’t seem to get everything right and there’s already talk of opting out of the update.

So there’s the dilemma: can we install and develop for IE7 or are we going to have to keep using the same old hacks for IE6 if there isn’t a mass take up?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Software, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “IE7 Now or Never”

  1. seanrox Says:
    October 20th, 2006 at 7:28 pm

    IE7 is still very buggy. I’ve actually uninstalled it from my machine as well as client machines until they get it working a little better.

    I still recommend Firefox or anything else besides IE for now.

  2. Ainslie Says:
    October 20th, 2006 at 9:59 pm

    Hey Sean, hows it going?

    Well I shall use Firefox forever! Or, like it’s going to happen, something better comes along.

    I have already seen one or two websites that are horribly disfigured in IE7 that even IE6 could do.

    The good news is that from what I can see, if you code without hacks, which I try to do, IE7 does seem to work most of the time.

  3. Andreas Says:
    October 21st, 2006 at 3:30 am

    I’ve been running the beta versions for several months, and IE7 is simply better than IE6 - in most ways. It is nowhere near as good as a fully expanded and personalized version of Firefox, but it is definitely a major improvement from the older versions.

    Beside the new features (which Firefox and Opera users have had for years) the support for CSS is obviously improved a lot in IE7. Now, if everyone could stick to the web standards and avoid using ugly, non-standard browser-specific hacks, there will be hope for the future of the web!

    It is exciting to say these words: I will never use IE6 on my own computer again! (Wow, that felt good…)

  4. Ainslie Says:
    October 21st, 2006 at 10:33 am

    Hi Andres,

    It is done! No more IE6 for me. Not that I used it or will use IE7 much.

    I think it is those ugly hacks that are breaking the few sites I have seen that don’t render in IE7.

    I think the message to IE users is, “you MUST upgrade” and the message for web developers is “you MUST stop the hacks - only use standards compliant XHTML (or HTML) and CSS”. :-)

  5. Arild Nygaard Says:
    October 29th, 2006 at 8:22 am

    This being said. How do I get my site to display in IE6 It’s ok in FF but not nice in IE

  6. Ainslie Says:
    October 29th, 2006 at 11:22 am

    It works fine in IE6 normally as can be seen here:

    http://themes.wordpress.net/testrun/?wptheme=535

    I think it may be due to the positioning of you Google ads. For starters the ad at the top of the page is outside of the body tag and the others in between the posts are too wide for the content area.