Kudos to Molly for being willing to ask Bill Gates tough questions straight to his face. Personally, I’m less interested in what MS is doing with regards to standards support in IE8 and more interested in what they’re doing to improve adoption rate of their newer browsers (like IE7 now, and IE8 when it’s available). Visit site »
Roger says:
IE 7 does not, repeat not, resize pixel-sized text. It partly compensates for that by allowing the user to scale/zoom the entire page, including images (which quickly leads to massive horizontal scrolling because of its bad implementation).
He’s right, of course. However, anyone who uses this fact that suggest that there’s still an accessibility issue with pixel-sized text in IE7 is wrong.
IE7 can increase the size of text set in pixels. Roger can make the distinction between text zoom and page zoom all he wants, but the bottom line is that you can increase the size of text set in pixels in IE7. Yes, it’s a full page zoom and not just a text zoom, but it’s still resizing the text set in pixels — right?
The fact that IE7’s implementation doesn’t make resizing the text as convienent as Firefox or Safari’s doesn’t matter. Accessibility and convienence are not the same thing. Don’t confuse them.
Accessibility gurus can no longer claim this as an accesibility problem with IE7. Period.
Me, I’m with Nathan Smith:
At least IE7 can zoom. As for me, I’m done baby-sitting Microsoft’s sorry attempts to produce a browser. We can only coddle the weakest link for so long, until it’s time to just say - Goodbye, laggards. Visit site »
Stuart Colville disovers that IE still pukes all over itself when you use italicized text. Wasn’t using italics a solved problem in, I dunno, 1984? Visit site »
“Four experts go head-to-head (to-head-to-head) to defend their Web browser of choice in an opinionated free-for-all.” Decent article. I’m still firmly in the Safari camp for everyday browsing, but I often switch to FF when in development mode. Visit site »
An analysis of several major corporate sites and their performance in IE7. Interesting, and basically shows that most sites work fine, or with relatively minor quirks in the new browser. The author insinuates that standards compliant sites perform worst in IE7 — but this is inaccurate. Instead, sites which break away from standards by using ugly hacks and filters in order to achieve the desired results in IE6 perform more poorly. CSS hacks and filters are often necessary, but you’re fooling yourself if you think they’re anything but ugly hacks — and if you think they won’t come back to bite you in the ass later on. They will — but unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it. Visit site »
Bottom line? It’s a large improvement, but still several steps behind Firefox, Safari, and Opera. If Microsoft intends to feature-enhance IE7 as infrequently as it did IE6 (read: never), then this could well be IE’s last stand. MS needed to leapfrog the competition with this release — instead, it didn’t even catch up to it. That having been said, it’s definitely better, and that’s good for us web designers and developers. Visit site »
It’s absolutely appalling that Microsoft would even ask us this question. “”We need you to test and ensure your sites, extensions, and applications are ready for IE7.” What? We’ve been here, ready, for years while IE6 sat stagnant. It’s up to you, Microsoft, to make your your browser is ready for our sites, not the other way around. We’re writing to the specs, and if you can’t render according to the specs, it’s going to be on you, not us. Are we ready? Hah. Let us know when you’re ready, Microsoft. Visit site »
I highly recommend not using these CSS hacks (or any others). If you need to target any version of IE, you should be using conditional comments. That having been said, it’s always good to know about these sorts of things just in case best practices break down for you at some point (and once in a while, they do). Visit site »
IE7 decouples ClearType settings from the OS and enables it by default in the browser. This is great news. Microsoft is really trying to do the right thing with IE7, it seems like. I can’t wait until it rolls out. Visit site »
This is a Very Good Thing™ for web designers and developers. It means that most XP users will get IE7 automatically, unless they explicitly opt-out. This should drastically increase IE7’s adoption rate. Visit site »
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Visit site »
Horse’s mouth. While the new IE may still not be perfect, it certainly looks as though it will be close to on-par with Firefox and Safari, which is a glorius thing. Whenever the thing has widespread adoption, I think we’ll finally start to see some really Visit site »
Bottom line: there are several nice improvements to Windows here, but not a single thing that Mac OS X doesn’t already offer. Frankly, I never would have guessed such an obvious ripoff of OS X would be so ugly. Visit site »
Looks like Microsoft is going to make us happy, after all. On the IE blog, it’s reported that they will fix most of the major bugs in IE7 beta 2, plus add support for alpha channels in PNGS, fixed positioning, and :hover on all elements. Yay! Visit site »
It would seem that IE7 will not be a mecca of CSS fixes and rendering enhancements, but rather IE6 with alpha PNG support and a few UI additions (notably, tabbed browsing). Disappointing. Nonetheless, it’ll be nice to have that PNG support. Visit site »
Well, at least we know IE 7 will be somewhat better. It will support PNGs with alpha channels and will have some CSS improvements (although details are fuzzy). Visit site »
We don’t know how much better, but any improvement will be welcome. Visit site »
This seems like good news, but as Dave Shea points out, it probably doesn’t matter. Visit site »
How Microsoft can support CSS2 without breaking the web. Visit site »