IE7 Initial Feedback - What’s Yours?
I’d like to know what everyone thinks of IE7? Can Microsoft turn it around? My initial reaction was more impressed than I thought I would be. Granted, they are few years behind the tabs and rss feed support as Apple’s Safari Browser has supported for a few years now. And they have also just introduced their own version of font smoothing. But they have been increasing their support for CSS2.0 after an outcry from the web developer/designer community. I have heard both good things and bad things from fellow co-workers, like it crashes a lot and it makes pages looks weird, I have also heard that its very slow. It took almost 60 seconds for FireFox.com to load, which I find rather ironic. Whats your feedback?
I was pleasantly surprised by ie7. It was far better than I expected (but still not good enough).
CSS support has definitely improved, and because it’s being adopted so fast, that’s terrific news
It’s almost on par with Firefox. Several CSS issues still exist, mostly involving padding or margins, but I haven’t had to use a hack in forever! Then again…I didn’t really need a hack in the beginning to start with.
Stupid alluring Tan Hack and its little asterix!
But back to IE: IE6 is the single most aggravating thing I’ve had to deal with. It doesn’t like transparent PNGs, doesn’t have very good CSS support for margins/padding and occasionally is a total dork. If they could patch that too in addition to having automatic updates to IE7 (because my district’s retarded and switched completely from Macs to crappy PCs (that use IE6) except for Digital Graphics classes), that would make my day
so… we are supposed to get rid of hacks, and I get that MS is trying like crazy to get users to update to IE7. The trouble for us designers is, that lots, and I mean lots, of users who are not terribly computer savvy are hesitant to download anything that they don’t understand. So now that we have this nice clean IE7 out, things have become far more complicated to get a site functioning in clean CSS code.
What I mean here is not only do we have to make sure that it works in IE6 as well as Firefox, Safari, etc… but many of the hacks that we could use to make it work in IE6 are now inherited in IE7–making the whole thing a mess!
For example–I’m working on a site right now. Fairly simple, two column design with a background image for the content in the 2nd column. Has a div that sits beneath the content w/a bg image to give the content area a nice rounded corner look, the upper rounded corners are included in the header. Cutting the design up and creating CSS took no time at all. Until I tested it in IE6. Which I can’t avoid, since about 80% of the people who will see this site for at least the first 3-6 mos after its release will still have IE6! I’ve now spent over 8 hours trying to make the darned thing work in IE6 without goofing it up in IE7 or anything else. Just isn’t happening! Why on earth didn’t MS make the “*” in front of a tag NOT affect IE7, which would have made our lives ever so much easier??
To view the site-in-progress I”m referring to, see: http://www.spiritmoves.com/index-new.html
Thanks.
Jaye